£102m windfall may not be enough to solve United’s Sancho and Greenwood dilemmas

While Saturday’s Champions League final at Wembley may have no English representation, for Manchester United it will be a contest watched with interest.

Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund will tussle it out in the final at the home of English football this evening for the right to lift the most glittering prize in the domestic European game. Ahead of Euro 2024, England star Jude Bellingham will seek to burnish his already stellar reputation by adding a Champions League winners medal to his collection at just 20.

On the opposition will be one of Bellingham’s compatriots, Jadon Sancho, a player who has been able to rebuild his faltering career thanks to a loan spell back at Dortmund from Manchester United, the club he joined in 2021 in a £73million deal. What happens next season remains an unknown.

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United, poor at player trading in comparison to their rivals in recent years, will look to move on fringe players and those no longer part of the future plans. Whether or not Sancho fits into that bracket remains to be seen, with the club likely to need a sizeable fee to encourage them to sell.

Sancho’s £73m signing on a five-year deal created an amortised cost in the annual financial accounts of £14.6m. Three years have almost passed on that initial deal and £43.8m has been accounted for, with Sancho’s remaining book value standing at around £29.2m. Only a fee over and above that would represent any kind of player trading profit for United.

Sums of around the £50m mark would seem feasible in the current market, but while Sancho’s loan deal has been a win-win-win for the player, United and for Dortmund, whether or not BVB will be able to be enter into that zone is up for discussion. Dortmund have been one of Europe’s best at player trading: from Bellingham to Erling Haaland, they have been able to buy cheap, sell high, using the funds to reinvest and start the cycle all over again.

This season their success has been helped by key loan deals for Premier League players who couldn’t get game time at their respective clubs, with Sancho arriving alongside Chelsea’s Ian Maatsen. The Bundesliga club paid a €3.5million (£3m) fee to loan Sancho for six months, with a further €4m (£3.4m) in potential add-ons along with Champions League clauses. United sources indicated to MEN Sport that a ‘significant’ bonus was activated when Dortmund qualified for the semi-finals, with another payment triggered when BVB reached the Wembley final by knocking out PSG.

Dortmund don’t tend to be big spenders in the market, and given that their previous biggest outlay was the €35m (£30m) for Ousmane Dembele for the 2023/24 season, taking a great financial leap on incomings hasn’t been the way of the Black and Yellow. But Champions League success may have altered both their ability and willingness to reinvest to a greater extent, with the club also linked with a potential move for another player on United’s books, Mason Greenwood, who has been on loan at Spanish side Getafe.

Dortmund have earned around £102m from the club’s run to the final this season, a sum made up of participation fees, prize money, UEFA coefficient and the makeup of Germany’s TV market pool. That gives the club some greater financial freedom when heading into the summer.

While Greenwood has been linked with a potential extension to his United deal in order to preserve his market value – with the forward having just one-year to run on his current contract, and any sale of his representing pure profit due to him being an academy graduate – Sancho looks to be further along the line when it comes to a potential permanent departure, especially given that a loan spell where he helped a side to the Champions League final on the grandest stage of all will have aided his own market value. Greenwood’s next transfer will likely be a loan, with Dortmund mooted as a potential destination.

The stumbling block for Dortmund won’t be the transfer fee; they will have the financial wherewithal for that. It will be the impact on payroll that adding someone like Sancho, reported to be on around £300,000 per week, far higher than any current Dortmund player, will have for the longer term.

It highlights a problem that the Premier League’s own wealth generation has created; one where wages have risen thanks to the booming media rights deals, but where the lack of riches at such a level elsewhere in Europe means that selling to other major European leagues is now harder than it ever has been because the cost of acquisition is just too high for even some of the continent’s heaviest hitters.

Dortmund, a club where a defined strategy has helped create consistent success despite routinely having to sell on their best assets, may baulk at the idea of spending their Champions League riches on a player they already said goodbye to at a high profit previously.