Having scored 38 goals since the beginning of the 2016/17 season, excitement levels soared when Manchester United lured Alexis Sanchez to Old Trafford from Arsenal in January 2018.
The Chilean, who had joined Arsenal from Barcelona in 2014, joined United as part of a deal that saw Henrikh Mkhitaryan move in the other direction. Considering United had secured themselves the services of a winger who had been free-scoring for the best part of 18 months, there was little doubt about who had got the better end of the deal.
Sanchez joined the club for a £14million fee and had already scored nine goals in the first half of the 2017/18 campaign, seven of which had been plundered in the Premier League. In truth, it was a relatively small fee to pay for such a reliable source of goals.
“I am thrilled to be joining the biggest club in the world,” Sanchez told United’s club website after completing his move to Old Trafford. “I have spent three-and-a-half wonderful years at Arsenal and I bring with me very positive memories of that great club and its fans.
“The chance to play in this historic stadium and to work with Jose Mourinho was something I could not turn down. I am very proud to be the first Chilean player ever to play for United and I hope I can show our fans all around the world why the club wanted to bring me here.”
Two-and-a-half-years, one loan spell and 45 appearances later, Sanchez’s United career reached the end of the road when he was allowed to join Inter Milan, who the aforementioned loan spell was with, on a free transfer in August 2020.
His relatively short stint at Old Trafford was massively underwhelming and nobody looks back on his time at the club with much fondness. His biggest highlight was scoring United’s equaliser in the 2018 FA Cup semi-final victory over Tottenham Hotspur.
In total, he scored a paltry five goals for the club, three of which were netted before his first and only full season in United colours. He made just 27 appearances in that campaign (2018/19) and struggled to nail down a starting berth under both Jose Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
Sanchez had been the subject of interest from Manchester City prior to his move to United, only for the Blues to back out of a deal to sign him because of his wage demands. That left United with a clear run to secure his signature.
But despite the words chosen by Sanchez at the time of his unveiling, he was not, as it turned out, overly thrilled at making the switch to Old Trafford, so much so that he wanted to quit after his very first training session at Carrington. The Chilean, who is now 35, revealed a month after leaving the Reds how he begged his agent to try and fashion a return to Arsenal for him.
Speaking back in September 2020, the attacker, who is now in a third spell at Inter, said: “I accepted the opportunity to go to United, it felt tempting and it was something good for me, I liked this club a lot when I was a kid. Eventually I signed but I didn’t ask for information on what was happening inside the club.
“Sometimes there are things that you don’t realise until you get there, and I remember the first training session I had, I realised a lot of things. After the session I got home and I told my family and my agent, ‘Can you not rip up the contract to go back to Arsenal?’.
“They laughed, I told them there’s something that doesn’t sit right, it doesn’t seem good. But I already signed, I was already there. After the first few months I carried on having the same feeling, we weren’t united as a team in that moment.”
At the juncture of Sanchez’s arrival at Old Trafford, United were on a four-game winning run and unbeaten in seven, meaning he should have walked into a happy, upbeat and vibrant camp. Instead, judging by his comments, he walked into a fractured and broken dressing room that wasn’t united.
Following his mid-season arrival in 2017/18, Sanchez made 18 appearances before the end of the campaign, helping United finish second in the Premier League table and reach the FA Cup final, only to be beaten by Chelsea at Wembley, losing out to Eden Hazard’s first-half penalty.
A little over a month into the 2018/19 campaign, Sanchez was left out of United’s matchday squad for the visit of West Ham United. It was a bombshell decision by Mourinho and it had a major impact on the winger.
“In a game with West Ham I wasn’t picked,” he said. “That had never happened to me as a player. It bothered me and I said it couldn’t be possible.”
Manchester Evening News
