Borussia Dortmund's Jadon Sancho, the most-experienced youngster in European football
Borussia Dortmund's Jadon Sancho is the millenium-born player with the most top-flight experience in any of Europe's top five leagues, a leading football research body has revealed.
Sancho has totalled 2,129 minutes in 34 Bundesliga appearances since swapping Manchester City for Dortmund in summer 2017, which already puts the 18-year-old ahead of his peers before his UEFA Champions League games and three senior England caps are taken into account.
In the study carried out by the CIES Football Observatory, Sancho actually placed second in the category of players born in the year 2000 to Fulham's Ryan Sessegnon, but he has played just 23 English Premier League games — all this season — with the vast majority of his experience gained in the second division, the Championship.
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Promising Saint-Etienne defender William Saliba topped the charts for those born post-2000, but he has made just seven Ligue 1 appearances for his club and — like Sessegnon — is yet to sample European football.
Bayern Munich newboy Alphonso Davies rated ninth behind Sancho — mostly thanks to his MLS experience — with future Bayern forward Jann-Fiete Arp 18th after coming to the fore at Hamburg before they were relegated from the Bundesliga last season.
Other Bundesliga prodigies also feature.
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Bayer Leverkusen's increasingly impressive Kai Havertz is fourth in the 1999 age group, which is topped by AC Milan goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma. RB Leipzig defender Ibrahima Konate and Hertha Berlin's Arne Maier are seventh and eighth respectively while another RBL man, Tyler Adams, is 16th with Evan N'Dicka of Eintracht Frankfurt 18th.
While Paris Saint-Germain's FIFA World Cup winner Kylian Mbappe unsurprisingly heads the 1998 category, Leipzig's Dayot Upamecano is not far behind in fourth, a place ahead of Dortmund's Christian Pulisic. Another BVB player, Achraf Hakimi, placed tenth, Stuttgart's Nicolas Gonzalez is 12th, with Josip Brekalo of Wolfsburg rounding out the top 20.
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