Man Utd must learn from Chelsea lesson after manager dropped 8 players and lost

Erik ten Hag can only push so far with his Man Utd fear tactics Tommy Docherty, then manager of Chelsea, once dropped eight players for breaking a curfew on a training trip to Blackpool. The hollowed-out team, deprived of the likes of Terry Venables, John Hollins and Eddie McCreadie, that Docherty put out against Burnley went down 6-2. Flexing your muscles as a manager – particularly on such a Charles Atlas scale – does not always work. But in the case of Jadon Sancho, Erik ten Hag has acted wisely for Manchester United in cold-shouldering his whingeing winger. Sending Sancho to the naughty step to train on his own could go one of two ways. When the United manager dropped Marcus Rashford for the game against Wolves last season for being late to a team meeting, Rashford was soon back and on the way to his most productive campaigns at the club. When Ten Hag dropped Cristiano Ronaldo for refusing to come on as a substitute against Spurs, it marked the beginning of the end. It seems more likely in the case of Sancho that he will be on his way before long too – and for substantially less than the £73m United paid for him given his output since his arrival from Borussia Dortmund. But regardless of the long-term outcome, maintaining internal discipline in the short-term is essential for the health of the team. It has not been easy for Ten Hag. At United, with blazes breaking out left, right and centre, the manager’s role must feel rather like that of a firefighter. Jadon Sancho has been removed from the current Man Utd senior set up SUBSCRIBE Invalid email We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you’ve consented to and to improve our understanding of you. This may include adverts from us and 3rd parties based on our understanding. You can unsubscribe at any time. More info At a club of United’s size with big-name players with big egos and big agents everything is big news. But this just makes it even more important that the manager manages to keep control of them. Sancho may feel it is unfair that Ten Hag can choose to call him out in the media over his training standards and yet he cannot defend himself publicly. And it is to an extent but that is the nature of the deal. The player/manager relationship, by its nature, has to be hierarchical. There are different ways of framing that relationship and not every manager has to be a Rottweiler. For every Alex Ferguson, there can be a Bobby Robson; for every Steve Evans, a Claudio Ranieri. But it can never be a marriage of equals. A player has to do his talking behind closed doors. In claiming on his social media account he had been made a scapegoat, that Ten Hag’s version of events was completely untrue and that there was more to his exclusion from the defeat at Arsenal than simply ropey rondos, Sancho was speaking from the heart but also shooting dangerously from the hip. He was effectively calling out Ten Hag as a liar. Ten Hag simply could not have let such rebelliousness go without risking the collapse of his authority. Quite why Sancho thought it would be a good idea to pen what equated to a 110-word public transfer request and leave it up for nine days on his personal Twitter account – or X as it is now known – is a mystery. Maybe he reasoned it would teach Ten Hag a lesson. Maybe he overassessed his own importance. Maybe he was just plain daft. Whatever, as a piece of a strategic miscalculation it was right up there with Luis Rubiales sealing Spain’s Women’s World Cup win with a kiss. A few home truths. Having arrived at United in the summer of 2021 with high hopes that he could prove to be one of the most exciting additions of recent times, Sancho has proven a let-down.