Jose Mourinho can help Renato Sanches get career back on track at Roma

Almost everybody who was there can remember the worst pass Renato Sanches ever made. It was so poorly placed it became a viral sensation.

He was playing for Swansea City, then of the English Premier League, on a late November night at Chelsea. He was wearing the Welsh club’s away kit, a similar share of red to a large logo on one of the perimeter advertising hoardings at Stamford Bridge.

Ball at his feet in midfield, under no particular opposition pressure, Sanches side-footed the ball directly out of play, over the touchline, to no teammate but directly at said logo. In the technical area, his head coach Paul Clement lowered his head into his hand in disbelief. Spectators laughed. Sanches was substituted at half-time.

The moment remains infamous, vivid in the memory because it marked the nadir of a young, hyped player’s sudden plunge. Sanches had found himself playing for Swansea – misplacing a pass, and blaming it on the visual disturbance of an advertising board – on loan barely six months after he had picked up a Bundesliga winners medal with Bayern Munich. Not much more than a year had passed since he won Euro 2016 as a teenager with Portugal and starred in Benfica’s league-winning side.

That year he won the ‘Golden Boy’ award, the prize for the best footballer under 21 in Europe. He had a queue of suitors. Bayern had agreed a transfer fee with Benfica of €35 million well ahead of the Euros, mindful other superclubs would be chasing him ever harder once they saw him galvanise the midfield in Portugal’s historic triumph.

It seemed a long way down to being shipped off to Swansea. Bayern had lost faith in him in the course of his first season in Bavaria. But the story of Sanches, or simply Renato as he is mostly known,