Celtic hoped to sign Sancho on loan from Manchester City – but the teenager moved to Dortmund for £10m instead.
If you’ve got Manchester City and Borussia Dortmund fighting over you at the age of 17, you must have some talent.
City were even willing to make 17-year-old Jadon Sancho the highest paid player in their academy when offering a staggering £30,000-a-week contract to the teenager in the summer, per The Telegraph.
Manager Pep Guardiola, too, insisted that he would have given Sancho minutes in the first-team this season. But that did not stop the England youth star, who had not played a single second in the senior squad at City, defecting to Germany to join Borussia Dortmund in a deal rising to £10 million.
Handed the number seven shirt vacated by Ousmane Dembele following his initial £96.8 million move to Barcelona, Sancho finally made his professional bow when coming on in the latter stages of Dortmund’s 2-2 draw with Eintracht Frankfurt on Saturday.
Though Dortmund were far from the only club fighting it out for the signature of arguably England’s brightest teenage talent. The Sun (page 63, April 21st) claimed that Scottish champions Celtic were hoping to take Sancho on loan, provided he stayed contracted to City.
Superstar-in-waiting
Sancho, who won the Golden Player award at the European Under-17 Championships in Croatia during the summer, would have joined fellow City starlet Patrick Roberts at Parkhead.
Roberts, who is spending another season at Celtic after an impressive 18-month loan spell in which he lifted two league titles, has taken his game to a new level under Brendan Rodgers, whose trust in young players could have got the best out of Sancho too
Instead, Celtic missed out – and it’s a measure of Sancho’s talent that Dortmund may already be facing a challenge to keep hold of him.
ESPN claim that Real Madrid have been sending scouts to watch the London-born wonderkid. And the La Liga champions clearly have no qualms about paying huge fees for an untested youngster, splashing out £39.6 million for Flamengo’s 16-year-old Vinicius Junior in May (The Guardian).
Celtic, it seems, have missed out on a superstar-in-waiting.
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