Could Leroy Sane return to Manchester City? It makes more sense now than ever before

Manchester City boast plenty of modern-day greats but few command affection among the fanbase quite like Leroy Sane.

He burned so brightly in the 2017-18 campaign, when he helped City win the title with 100 points and was named PFA Young Player of the Year, that there is a sense around the Etihad Stadium that he has some unfinished business

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No surprise, then, that the suggestion that City are interested in bringing him back from Bayern Munich next summer was warmly received by those who wish he had never left.

“I haven’t given it any thought yet,” Sane said about his future at the end of last week. “The club want to have talks but I want to focus on this season.”

Despite saying very little, it gave the impression that something is indeed on the cards — not least because this is essentially how his departure from City came about; City wanted to extend his deal, he did not.

First, Bayern do want to extend Sane’s deal, which expires in 2025.

“This is the best Leroy Sane Bayern has had so far,” their sporting director Christoph Freund said recently. “He’s one of the players we want to build the future of the team around.”

Bayern, for their part, are confident Sane, 27, will renew his deal and no wonder they want him to — at the start of the season, Thomas Tuchel suggested the Germany international could “dominate the league” and this season, that is what he is doing.

If Bayern are wrong, though, there are likely to be other suitors in the frame.

Liverpool have been linked before, which represents a gut-wrenching scenario for City fans. There is good news and bad news on that front: it may be that London is the more likely destination if a Premier League return is going to happen.

Sane’s partner, Candice Brook, is English and was criticised in Germany this year for moving back home, although that was a temporary measure due to flooding in their Munich home and they are back in Bavaria now.

Although Sane himself was spotted in Manchester, life in the English capital could act as a trump card if one of the city’s top clubs makes a move — Arsenal have been linked in the past. Any firm interest from Spain’s biggest sides might trump even that, though, and Real Madrid have been following him closely.

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For those reasons, a return to City still seems unlikely — perhaps even ‘fanciful’, as we called it at The Athletic earlier this year — but in a purely sporting sense, a return would make more sense than it would have done in recent years, even in recent months.

Sane is playing fantastically well. In past seasons, he still had the air of a player attempting to find his feet, and due to how the forward tends to handle those kinds of situations, his body language can suffer — irking those around him, which happened with Pep Guardiola and City players while in Manchester, and was the same in Munich.

“Leroy has very high demands of himself,” a senior Bayern source told The Athletic this season, on condition of anonymity to protect relationships. “Everyone in the dressing room knows he’s one of the best players, if not the best, when he plays to his full potential. But when things didn’t come off, he often very quickly got frustrated and dropped his head.

“He has become much more experienced and resilient. An early mistake doesn’t derail him. He doesn’t go missing any more.”

He has been the Bundesliga’s standout player this season, with The Athletic’s Raphael Honigstein noting that “his amount of downtime — passages of little impact during games — has shrunk from entire weeks to a few minutes here and there.”

He is also providing a regular goal threat, as can be seen from where he takes his shots (graphic below). This season, he is registering an average of 0.2 expected goals (xG) per shot, which suggests one in five of his shots will result in a goal. That 0.2 xG per shot average is better than double the average from his debut Bundesliga campaign.

Sane’s defensive work has also improved markedly — something that would certainly be required at City — and he has eight goals and six assists in 11 league matches. It may have come later than many expected, but he looks like the player he threatened to become when he was thriving in Manchester five years ago.

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He was so keen to leave City in 2020 that, when football resumed following the Covid-19-enforced break, he immediately moved to Bayern rather than help Guardiola’s men complete their season, despite not being able to play for his new club until the following campaign.

Combined with his stuttering form in Munich in his first couple of seasons, a return to City would not have made much sense: he did not want to be there, was not playing especially well and Guardiola’s side have won the title every year since anyway.

There was hardly a need for him, then, not least stylistically. In Sane’s absence, Guardiola rebuilt another fine City side that did not usually involve a striker and required “a thousand, million passes” as the Catalan likes to say: there was more control than ever and counter-attacks almost became anathema.

And the entire tactical backstory at City last season, following Erling Haaland’s arrival, was that Guardiola wanted the same amount of control but had to find it in a different way. The answer ended up being John Stones stepping up from defence into midfield and then into the attack, but also involved wingers who take more touches, who do not look to make runs in behind, who know how to keep hold of the ball long enough to allow their team-mates to organise themselves behind them.

The message from the training pitch was that direct, pacy wingers were less important to Guardiola’s blueprint than ever before. The approach from the manager’s first years was a thing of the past.

“It was more dynamic, more crosses: me on one side, Leroy Sane on the other; two motorbikes, just constant zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom,” Raheem Sterling explained during his final season at City. “Now, it’s more patient, more keep-ball and not as dynamic, but both teams kept the ball really well and score goals.”

And then Jeremy Doku happened. The 21-year-old has lit up the Etihad just like Sane used to, even earning himself a place in the starting XI away at Chelsea ahead of Jack Grealish, a player beloved by Guardiola and one who helps provide that control in spades.

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It is not like Doku is reckless in possession, though. “What surprised me the most is how clever he is when he has to make a decision, it’s really good,” Guardiola says, which probably explains why Doku has played so much: there is more to his game than electric dribbles.

In fact, Guardiola has actually highlighted a difference between Sane and Doku.

“Jeremy doesn’t have the pace like, for example, Leroy had over 40 metres, long pace.”

Not that that would be a bad thing; counter-attacks have been back on the agenda since Haaland arrived.

And Doku shows that there is room at City for wingers who can take a man on, who pick their moments to try to make a difference in the final third. Sane has been showing that he is certainly still capable of that — from both wings and, as a result of cutting in from the right, often down the middle — and while he could always manipulate space for himself with a tidy shimmy, he looks very comfortable in small spaces now.

A return does not appear especially likely at the moment given Bayern’s desire to renew his deal and the potential for rival interest from London and Madrid, but the current Sane would look far more at home in Guardiola’s plans than he would have done for years.

(Top photo: Daniel Kopatsch/Getty Images)