Going to be interesting how Dortmund is going to play this out. I’m not surprised at all if they managed to keep him but that's probably because other clubs don't want to have big net spend.
There is no way Dortmund will not have financial issue by end of the season. This restrictions on the crowds due to covid will really put them into difficult situation, last season they lost about 40m euro and that's due to 2 months football with restriction on crowds, can't imagine what happened with 9-10 months restriction. At first I thought they won this by keeping Sancho but after knowing this restriction will likely continue to end of the season, I think they lost at the end.
I'm betting the big clubs in particular are putting some very serious thought into how Covid19 will affect this season, where that will leave them and everybody else next summer, and how that impacts on transfer strategy. There was clearly an expectation from some this summer, when the worst of the restrictions were behind us and everyone was in a reopening mindset, that crowds would return to stadiums before too long. That was poor planning. The reality is that until mass vaccination has been carried out, the situation does not fundamentally change. This means either lockdown measures will stay in place, or they will be relaxed only to be followed by another wave of infections after 4-6 weeks, which will in turn bring back lockdown measures. While this goes on, the question will not be when to re-open stadiums, but whether football can continue at all (it probably can, given the effectiveness of the protocols in place since the spring). Mass vaccination as an accomplished fact will not happen until spring 2021 at the earliest. Which means a full season of TV, merchandise and sponsorship revenue only. The financial impact will be much worse than last season - and everyone is going to be worse off financially than they were this summer.
The effect this summer was not so much to drive down prices, but rather to greatly reduce the volume of trading. With less demand, it wasn't a good market to sell into. We ended up with neither a sellers market nor a buyers market: The buyers were fewer and less able to pay, the sellers had good reason to hang on to their assets until the market improved. There weren't that many deals that looked like cut-price. Even Championship clubs with a big payroll and no big TV money to rely on generally priced their top assets out of the market.
The big question is, are many clubs still going to be able to hang on to their assets for another year? If they aren't, and simultaneously the usual buyers have less money to spend than usual, it seems possible that prices could drop. (If one really wants to be positive towards Woodward & co (who does though), one could suspect that they decided to stick only to nice-price deals this summer, in anticipation of lucrative hunting grounds next summer. Saving up for Black Friday, as it were. )