From Sánchez to Sancho: Manchester United’s Lost Boys in decade of waste

They are Manchester United’s Lost Boys, victims of the meat grinder of English football’s most wasteful club, flushed down a seething well of talent. Each received excitable advanced notices and premature hero worship, only to be dragged into the black hole that is Old Trafford in the lost decade since

Sir Alex Ferguson stepped down. Any nascent talent now joins the club at the peril of being damned by United; there are many warnings from recent history to abide by.

Ferguson’s United was the club where youth flourished and attacking talent was given freedom of expression and ammunition to thrive. The club’s prime youth products of the past decade are Marcus Rashford, whose current form is being lamented, and Scott McTominay, who United were willing to sell this summer. United always spent big but perhaps only Bruno Fernandes, himself still a divisive figure, could be said to have joined the club and fully enhanced his reputation.

As Barney Ronay wrote in these pages of Wilfried Zaha, he was “the first of the Lost Boys”, his 167 minutes for United setting a template of failure. Signed midway through Ferguson’s final season but allowed to remain at Crystal Palace, where he had been the best player in the Championship, until the summer, Zaha arrived as David Moyes did. Neither would last the first season and as Moyes’s regime curdled, Zaha was loaned to Cardiff in January 2014, his departure the subject of the type of wild rumour that became common to his fellow flops. Once returned to Palace, he soon returned to being that club’s most crucial player.

Zaha’s opportunities were limited by the brief flourishing of Adnan Januzaj, whose first few appearances were so impressive that discussions of trying to naturalise a Belgium-born teenager with Albanian-Kosovar roots for England became a tabloid row. Moyes