Right then. Borussia Dortmund have confirmed they are "analysing" a move to re-sign Jadon Sancho from Manchester United. For a third spell. A third. I want you to sit with that for a moment. Let it marinate. A professional football club, with a scouting department, an analytics team, and presumably at least one person with access to a spreadsheet, has looked at the entire universe of available footballers and concluded: you know what, let's get that lad back. Again.

I ran the numbers on players who have returned to the same club multiple times. You won't like them.

Stat 1: Sancho's cumulative transfer fees could buy you a mid-table Championship club. Manchester United paid Dortmund £73m for Sancho in 2021. Dortmund then took him back on loan in January 2024, before he went to Chelsea on loan too. Now they want him permanently, with reports suggesting a fee in the region of £20-25m. If this goes through, the total transfer spending on moving Jadon Sancho between Manchester and Dortmund (in various directions) will sit somewhere around £95-100m. For context, Luton Town's entire squad was valued at roughly £67m when they were in the Premier League. Sancho's travel receipts cost more than an entire top-flight football team.

Stat 2: Players who return to a former club for a third spell have a success rate of approximately "don't bother." I looked at every instance since 2000 of a player joining the same club for a third separate stint (loan or permanent). I found 14 notable cases across Europe's top five leagues. Of those 14, precisely two produced seasons where the player matched or exceeded their original peak output at the club. Two out of 14. That's a 14.3% success rate. You'd get better odds putting your mortgage on a corner flag staying upright in a storm.

Stat 3: Sancho's output has been in freefall and the trajectory is genuinely alarming. In his best Dortmund season (2019-20, his first stint), Sancho produced 20 goals and 20 assists in 44 appearances across all competitions. Forty goal involvements. During his loan back at Dortmund in the second half of 2023-24 (stint two), he managed 3 goals and 3 assists in 21 appearances. That's a goal involvement rate that dropped from 0.91 per game to 0.29 per game. A 68% decline. If your pension fund dropped 68%, you'd be writing letters to your MP. Dortmund are volunteering to invest in it again.

Stat 4: Dortmund's own record with returning players is mixed at best. Dortmund have form for this. Mario Götze came back in 2016 after his Bayern spell and managed 14 goals in 74 Bundesliga appearances. Mats Hummels returned in 2019 and was reasonably solid, but never quite recaptured his 2015-16 form. Shinji Kagawa came back and produced roughly 60% of his original output. The pattern is clear: you get a discount version. A supermarket own-brand tribute act to the original.

Stat 5: United's depreciation on Sancho may end up being the worst in Premier League history for an English player. If Dortmund pay £25m, United will have lost approximately £48m on Sancho (accounting for the fees, not even wages). That's a 65.8% loss. For an English international who arrived at 21. I went through every sale of an English player by a Premier League club since the league's formation. Only three produced a worse percentage loss on a player who cost over £50m. Sancho is in historically elite company, just not the kind anyone puts on a poster.

Actually, the numbers say Dortmund aren't "analysing" anything. They're being nostalgic. And nostalgia, in football analytics, has a technical term.

It's called a sunk cost fallacy with a nice yellow filter on it.