If you think football will stop going money mad.. wait for the crazy battle to sign super Sancho

ROXANA MARACINEANU, France’s Minister of Sports (right) reckons the Tour de France – you know, that three-week bike race that covers well over 2,000 miles of mountains and roads, passing through hundreds and hundreds of villages, towns and cities and whic

HAVING served a long stretch in the nick for evading £25million in taxes, Uli Hoeness is probably not the go-to guy for wise financial discussion.

But the former Bayern Munich president (below) is certainly not alone when he says he simply cannot envisage transfer fees of a hundred million euros whenever player trading resumes.

There is a widespread feeling football will simply have to scale back its lavish spending, prices for players will plummet and gargantuan wages will be drastically trimmed. There are sound reasons for this thinking.

Clubs will have taken a huge financial hit from the coronavirus crisis, commercial deals will be tougher to negotiate because sponsors will have also suffered and there might be penalties in TV deals as so much football will have been lost.

And, morally, it will just not feel right. There will be a new reality for football to face, a lot say. Let’s face it, though, it will probably be a new reality for football to ignore. The global appetite for the game – particularly for the elite, glamorous game – will never have been greater.

The quest to cash in on that appetite, led by the commercial club giants of

Europe, will never have been greater.

The same big operations in Manchester, London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Turin and Munich will go back to fighting for the limited amount of blue-chip talent.

That will be the reality and that is why transfer fees for the most-prized talents will still be enormous, rest assured. That is why it will take at least a hundred million euros to sign Jadon Sancho from Borussia Dortmund.

There will be a multi-cornered scrap for Sancho and, right now, the signs are that Manchester United look the strongest in that fight.

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of Ole Gunnar

Solskjaer’s permanent appointment and if Ed Woodward and the United manager can persuade Sancho to join, it will be the biggest coup of their relatively short time working in harness.

Their signings so far have been very decent. But when push came to shove in the cases of Daniel James, Harry Maguire, Aaron Wan-bissaka and even Bruno Fernandes, United were pretty much in a one-horse race for their signatures.

The Sancho pursuit will be different. There is probably not a single member of Europe’s elite that would not take him. He is that good.

There has been the odd indiscretion at Dortmund that could suggest he might not be straightforward to manage, but nothing of any serious note.

His statistics reflect the impact he has had at Dortmund. Across 84 games in the Bundesliga and Champions League, Sancho – who turned 20 on Wednesday – has 30 goals and 40 assists. On the international stage for England, he has four assists and two goals in 11 appearances. Sancho’s recruitment would be a huge coup for United, possibly their most significant signing since an 18-year-old Wayne Rooney joined the club in 2004.

Significant for two particular reasons. Because it would show how United, despite all the misgivings about Woodward’s stewardship, remain a huge, deeply-magnetic draw. And because it would show one of the brightest talents of his generation believes in Solskjaer and his vision for a great club.

Whatever the post-crisis price-tag, that would be worth the fee alone.

PLAYERS, coaching staff and senior management at Leeds United have volunteered to take a wage deferral for the foreseeable future to ensure the non-football staff can be paid.

It is a compassionate, classy move.

But the number of EFL clubs who have been plunged into an instant cash crisis by the pandemic is a marker of just how many exist weekto-week on the financial precipice.

You can only hope that changes when all this is over – but you doubt it.

ONE-HORSE RACE No one really challenged United forjames, Maguire, Wan-bissaka & Fernandes Every elite club in Europe will be chasing Dortmund’s England star Sancho

THE acts of compassion and generosity from the sporting world have been arriving thick and fast. The million pound/euro/ dollar/swiss franc donation to the coronavirus fight is becoming wonderfully commonplace. Conor Mcgregor is among such donors and good on him. And maybe he might have a word with his mate Dana White, the preposterous ‘president’ of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Among plenty of shameful nuggets in an odious outburst was this one: “How long are we going to stay in our houses and hide? If the coronavirus is going to get me, then so be it. It is what it is.” If you’re not bothered about getting it, Dana, fine. But you should be bothered if you pass it on to other people. To nurses, to doctors, to people whose job is not to organise fights. Or maybe this type of rant is just a pathetic attempt to keep UFC in the news. It is best ignored. Never thought I would say this, but you are better off listening to Mcgregor.

INEVITABLY, there have been a fair few people involved in professional sport who have not grasped the seriousness of the situation right now. But in a bunch finish, the winner for the most insensitive character goes to trainer Mark Johnston (below) a notably pompous sort at the best of times – who said at the start of this week that the decision to suspend horse racing here was a “grave mistake”. Someone tell him it would, literally, have been a “grave mistake” to keep it going.