Manchester United officially opened their new £7million training base for the club’s women’s and academy teams at Carrington on Tuesday, but for Jadon Sancho some things remain the same.
Sancho has been training on his own at the academy facilities since the beginning of October, after he was exiled by Erik ten Hag for publicly branding the United manager a liar over his reasons for dropping him for the 3-1 away defeat by Arsenal.
It is a measure of Sancho’s dramatic fall from grace at United that a player who cost £73m in the summer of 2021 after a protracted transfer pursuit is now reduced to such a sad, peripheral figure.
The 23-year-old winger continues to work alone at Carrington where he is forbidden to mix or eat with his team-mates.
Sancho even has to lock the door when he changes in the academy due to safeguarding issues relating to any senior player mixing with minors.
It is understood that the player can come in from the cold if he says sorry to Ten Hag — but only if the apology is sincere.
So far Sancho has refused to give his manager the apology he wants, and is showing no signs of backing down despite the appeals from senior figures at the club and his own team-mates.
He has spent the last six-and-a-half weeks training on his own, and there is a growing feeling that even if he were to say sorry at this stage it would be an empty gesture and may still not be acceptable to Ten Hag.
If the matter remains unresolved, United will listen to offers for the England international in January, two-and-a-half years on from his big-money move from Borussia Dortmund.
He has struggled to live up to expectations ever since.
United are prepared to take a significant loss on Sancho, if it means supporting Ten Hag who was brought in to improve discipline which had lapsed under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Ralf Rangnick.
Sources point out that this was not Sancho’s first transgression under Ten Hag, whose strict rules led to him dropping top scorer Marcus Rashford at Wolves last season because he was 30 seconds late for a team meeting on the morning of the match. But it is by far the most serious, and they will continue to back Ten Hag to the hilt, mindful that discipline is the bedrock for his United rebuild.
Meanwhile, United’s new facility is now open after the club gradually moved their women’s and academy players over the last few weeks.
It will be the new permanent home of the women’s team and includes state-of-the-art training facilities, first-team restaurant and analysis rooms. The academy teams will also benefit, with access to a separate gym in the new building.
Collette Roche, United’s chief operating officer, said: ‘We are always looking to improve our facilities and we are delighted the detailed planning has led to an outstanding building that will rival any women’s training facilities in Europe and provide space for growth for our academy.
‘Across our facilities we have invested more than £20m in improvement work over the last year and this building is an example of the progress we are making to create the best environments for our teams to succeed.’
