Lisandro Martínez & Jadon Sancho: Ajax grit meets Dortmund flair

Two imports, two very different stories

When Manchester United rebuilt around Erik ten Hag in the summer of 2022, they didn't just sign a manager, they signed his old club's totem. Lisandro Martínez arrived from Ajax for a fee reported between £47m and £49m, having spent three seasons there becoming, in the words of Ajax's own scouts, 'tough as nails' with a 'winning mentality'. He'd won two Eredivisie titles, a KNVB Cup, and the club's Player of the Year award. By the time he landed at Old Trafford, 'Licha' was Ajax personified: combative, left-footed, allergic to losing a duel.

Sancho's story ran in the opposite direction. A year earlier, in 2021, he'd completed a £73m move to United from Borussia Dortmund, where he'd spent four years as one of the most electric young wingers in Europe, 12 goals and 14 assists in a single Bundesliga season, a Golden Boy runner-up, a Bundesliga Team of the Season regular. He was, by reputation, Dortmund's academy success story turned Premier League statement signing.

That these two very different footballing CVs, the uncompromising Ajax leader and the silky Dortmund winger, briefly overlapped under the same manager, at the same club, in the same dressing room, is easy to forget. But in 2022–23 they did.

A season that went very differently for each of them

Martínez's first United season was, by most accounts, a triumph of adaptation. He won the club's Player of the Month award for August after facing down Liverpool and Southampton, scored his first goal against Arsenal in January, and lifted the EFL Cup in February 2023, his first United trophy. An injury in the Europa League quarter-final against Sevilla ended his campaign prematurely, but the impression had been made: this was a defender being compared to Nemanja Vidić within months of arriving.

Sancho's campaign was more stop-start. He scored in the Champions League against Villarreal and in the league against Chelsea, but didn't make his first appearance of the following season until returning from a knock in February 2023 for an EFL Cup semi-final. By September 2023, his United career had unravelled publicly, left out of a squad for 'performances in training', a social-media rebuttal, and then a loan back to the one club where everyone already understood what he was: Dortmund.

Why the overlap still surprises

That's really the heart of it. Sancho's post-United path has pulled him back towards Dortmund, then to Chelsea and Aston Villa on loan, collecting a Champions League final appearance and a Conference League and Europa League winner's medal along the way, three different European finals for three different clubs in three straight seasons. Martínez, meanwhile, has stayed at United and kept lifting trophies there, from the 2023 EFL Cup to the 2024 FA Cup final against Manchester City, while carrying on his international story with Argentina through two Copa Américas and a World Cup win.

Neither man's career is remembered through United's prism alone, Martínez belongs to Ajax and Argentina, Sancho to Dortmund and England's youth golden generation. But for one Premier League season, before their paths diverged again, both wore red at Old Trafford.