By now I’m sure you’ve heard the news: Pogba has been banned from football for four years under anti-doping rules. At age 30, so long out of the game likely ends his career. Even if he were to get the ban cut in half on appeal, this is still someone who hasn’t played 90 minutes of football since March 2022. Whenever his ban ends, he won’t have played regularly for a long time. Perhaps he could find some lower-ranking club somewhere, but it’s over at the highest level.
There’s plenty to be said about what this means for football’s insistence that doping isn’t happening in the sport, and whether much more serious questions need to be asked elsewhere. As far as I can tell (which, admittedly, is not very far), DHEA, the substance he tested positive for, is debatably useful for the aim of raising testosterone levels. If footballers are taking more provably effective performance-enhancing drugs, it’s probably hidden away to avoid these kinds of test results.
But I’m not really qualified to talk about that (and I’d prefer not to get sued). What I can talk about is Pogba, his career, and how we can look back on what’s surely a completed arc.
Pogba was always going to be the next big thing. He ruffled some feathers as a 16-year-old when he decided to leave Le Harve for Manchester United, having already established himself as the captain of his age group for France. Le Harve threatened to sue United and claimed Pogba had been lured by money, but come on, Old Trafford was the better place to be if he wanted to develop as a footballer.
He was then part of a very exciting United youth side that included players like Michael Keane (now of Everton), Sam Johnstone (Crystal Palace) and Jesse Lingard (FC Seoul, but you know, he was better than his reputation these days for a long time). But the two big stars, without question, were Ravel Morrison and Pogba. Morrison, whose last club was DC United in a career that took him everywhere from the Championship to Liga MX to the Swedish Allsvenskan, was tipped to be a huge star for United and England, which makes him a flattering comparison for Pogba. It is really hard to make it as a top footballer. Some of the most talented kids you’d ever watch achieved nothing at senior level for one reason or another. Most would kill for Pogba’s career.
He was training with the United first team by 2011/12 and certainly felt he had done enough to start. By New Year’s Eve 2011, United were desperately short on players through injuries and, err, excursions. Darren Fletcher and Tom Cleverley were both injured, Anderson was only fit enough for the second half (and even then, it was a push), Ryan Giggs had played a lot of football recently and needed a rest at age 38, Darron Gibson had seemingly fallen out with Sir Alex Ferguson, while Michael Carrick had to deputise at centre back. United really didn’t have any central midfielders for a home game against relegation candidates Blackburn. Ferguson started Rafael da Silva and Park Ji-sung in midfield. Pogba was on the bench.
“There was no one left to play in midfield”, Pogba explained in 2014. “And I was training and I was beginning to get better bit by bit and the coach never stopped telling me, 'You're this far'. And I didn't understand. This far away from what? Playing? From having some playing time? From getting on the field? Or what? And there was Rafael in midfield and I was disgusted. I was disgusted and I didn't get on either.”
United lost the game 3-2 in one of the biggest upsets of the season. Considering they would lose the league title that May on goal difference, even a draw would’ve kept the trophy at Old Trafford and cancelled out the famous Sergio Agüero last last-minute goal. It would’ve also saved the club a £90 million transfer fee down the line. “I'd lost that thing, that relation that I had with the coach”, Pogba said. “I was really disappointed. I was pushed. My eyes were opened. I'd made this decision to sign with Juventus. There was nothing to regret.”
And so he decided not to sign a new contract at United, instead heading to Italy and Juventus. The Bianconeri could hardly guarantee first-team minutes. Antonio Conte had transformed the club in his first season in charge, taking them from midtable to the title built around a superb midfield three of Andrea Pirlo, Arturo Vidal and Claudio Marchisio. It took him some time, but he began starting games ahead of Marchisio around halfway through his first season at Juventus and never looked back.
That Juventus side was perfect for him. Pirlo, arguably the most aesthetically pleasing passer of all time, could dictate the tempo of matches, while Vidal was probably the world’s best all-rounder, doing everything you could want of a midfielder reasonably well. The two of them offered enough that they could’ve been a midfield double pivot without even needing a third player. Pogba didn’t have to run the show. He just needed to provide sublime moments of quality, which he did frequently, while still offering enough defensive work to let Conte trust him.
Conte as a manager always knows what he wants everyone on his team to do at all times. That can certainly frustrate some players. “It was like going to school”, Cesc Fàbregas, who played for Conte at Chelsea, explained. “He will tell you, from the goalkeeper until you have scored a goal, what you have to do, exactly everything. I had coaches like Pep [Guardiola] who had a lot of positioning game but we had freedom inside of this. With Conte, the freedom was non-existent, he was telling me where I have to pass the ball.” Pogba thrived in this environment. Conte would give him specific tactical instructions for him to execute, and he would do it. Easy, right?
Conte’s successor, Max Allegri, was more of a pragmatist. He wanted organisation, especially out of possession, but he wasn’t going to tell players exactly where to pass the ball. Pirlo and Vidal both left the club in 2015 and the midfield became more industrious, with Sami Khedira coming in and Marchisio starting more frequently. Pogba, then, became more of a creative outlet in the final third, breaking 20 goals and assists in Serie A. This was the version of Pogba who truly caught the eye, the one who seemed like he could contribute in all phases of play, and the one Man Utd paid a fortune to bring back to Old Trafford.
His timing was all wrong here. United had just sacked Louis van Gaal and hired José Mourinho. I don’t think Van Gaal was hard done by here because his team played some absolutely turgid stuff at times. But Van Gaal is someone with a very clear idea of what he wants at all times. He would’ve given Pogba some very strict and specific responsibilities. I have no idea if this would have worked, but Conte was able to get a huge impact from Pogba through a similar approach.
Instead, he had Mourinho, someone who wants to be disciplined without the ball but gives players freedom to figure it out in attack. I think the plan was to follow the model from the manager’s second spell at Chelsea. The Blues were largely a compact side, but Fàbregas sat next to Nemanja Matić with the freedom to hit passes quickly and open up the game. This suited Fàbregas’ passing range perfectly, even if it did leave Chelsea surprisingly open for a Mourinho side. The idea, then, was for Pogba to play the Fàbregas role.
United didn’t have most of the pieces Mourinho needed in that first season, but I thought this aspect worked pretty well. It felt like their entire attacking plan was for Pogba to pass straight to Zlatan Ibrahimović, which wasn’t sophisticated, but they’re certainly good players. Nonetheless, no one was happy with Pogba’s performances. The narrative pretty quickly became that he wasn’t delivering for a record-breaking transfer fee, that he wasn’t taking games by the scruff of the neck and dominating as he was expected to. As James Yorke explained at the time, Pogba was doing a lot of good things in terms of creative passing and build-up play. His expected goals and assists were actually higher than his time at Juventus. But it fell on deaf ears. As Yorke put it:
“United paid the premium to get an all round midfielder for his prime years and at a new club with a new manager, his first season has been solid. Expectations of huge output may go alongside his fee, but fail to understand his strengths and what type of player he actually is. He isn't a one man attack like typical world record transfers and he never will be.”
United spent to level up that summer. Matić came in to sit in the double pivot next to Pogba, while Romelu Lukaku effectively replaced Ibrahimović (who was still around, but very injured) upfront. Matić would obviously do the same job he did at Chelsea next to Cesc Pogba, while Lukaku would give the attack the mobility it lacked with an ageing Ibrahimović. It was looking more like a Mourinho team.
It wasn’t great. The results were good, but they relied on an absolutely monster season from David De Gea holding a pretty porous defence together. Some of that should be on the back four, as I think we can be pretty sure in 2024 that Antonio Valencia, Chris Smalling, Victor Lindelöf and Ashley Young are not amazing individual defenders. Pogba and Matić in front of them never looked like a solid double pivot. Matić, I think, goes under the radar as a really bad signing against what United needed for the role. He had declined quite a bit in his last two seasons at Chelsea, which is why they were selling him in the first place, but Mourinho seemed to think he’d suddenly become an all-conquering defensive midfielder again. He didn’t have anything like the mobility to shield that back four.
But everyone ignored that and blamed Pogba.
I do think he has to take some of the blame. His volume of tackles and interceptions per 90 were down about 20% (per WhoScored), which lacks context but doesn’t tell a great story. He wasn’t capable of being a solid midfielder in a double pivot. But Mourinho hardly put him in a position to succeed. Pogba had never played in a double pivot at Juventus, nor did the system provide the kind of protection needed for the system to work. I think Mourinho just had this idea of recreating the Fàbregas tactic without really thinking through the differences between the two players. At the same time, as such a big-money signing, the general public expected Pogba to score and assist goals, take games by the scruff of the neck and deliver in the final third in huge moments. He can’t do that while shielding the back four.
Pogba did contribute that season. He led Man Utd in progressive passes and passes into the third, while being worth half an expected goal or assist per 90. That’s a really good creative midfielder in my book, but it’s not a player anyone knew what to do with.
He was never quite what people wanted to project onto him. As Carl Anka put it, “the Frenchman was expected to offer the passing of Andrea Pirlo, the running of Arturo Vidal and the tackling of Claudio Marchisio — all in one player”. He was capable of doing it all, but in flashes, more likely to do a few utterly sublime things in a game than run a match for 90 minutes. That he had such a diverse range of skills meant, I think, that no one after Conte really nailed down three or four core qualities for him to focus on. If United needed him to be a disciplined deep-lying playmaker then he should’ve been more clearly coached to do those things. He always felt like a player asked to figure out how to do it all himself.
This worked better for France, both because they had a pretty simple tactical setup and because N’Golo Kanté did all the defensive work of two men. Pogba’s job, then, was to pick the ball up in his own half and launch it forward, either to Olivier Giroud’s head or to Kylian Mbappé running into space. As John Burn-Murdoch pointed out, Pogba was the best midfielder at the World Cup in terms of advancing the ball forward quickly, while Kanté was the best destroyer. He understood specifically what he had to do and did it brilliantly.
Though maybe the solution was obvious: play him in a midfield three. That’s what worked for Juventus, and playing with Kanté counts as a trio. His best few months of football at United came during Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s honeymoon period, when the side played a narrow 4-3-3 that allowed Pogba to roam alongside Ander Herrera with Matić sitting deeper. It wasn’t always great, but that shape felt like a formula to get the best out of Pogba and the side collectively. Solskjaer’s idea of the “Manchester United way”, though, seemed to be more of a 4-2-3-1 shape with proper wingers. When the club signed Bruno Fernandes to play as a classic number ten in January 2020, it all but ensured Pogba would never have a midfield three.
This might be why Ferguson didn’t trust him back in 2011. United always played two central midfielders in his time which, by this point, required both players to be more tactically disciplined. Pogba getting into the final third would’ve been fine in the 1990s, but it didn’t suit the team by this stage. He would’ve had to develop into a different sort of player, because Ferguson’s United were not a great tactical fit for him.
And that was, weirdly, kind of it. The first three years of his United return were defined by doing some brilliant things while frustrating many. The next three years were defined by not playing. He only started 44% of league matches over his last three seasons at Old Trafford. Even in his best of those campaigns in terms of minutes, 20/21, Scott McTominay and Fred started more often. Everyone knew he wouldn’t sign another contract and would leave the club as a disappointing season. It felt more and more like he was serving his notice.
Does he deserve criticism for that? Maybe. It’s very hard to assign blame for injuries from the outside. Did his body fail him? Did he not do enough to take care of himself? Did he show a lack of interest in getting fit for games? I tend to side with the players on these matters, but no one other than Pogba actually knows. I think it certainly damaged his standing in football, though. Manchester City were apparently interested in signing him on a free in 2022, but he instead chose Juventus, who had just finished fourth in Serie A. There’s no football or even money rationale for Juventus over City, but it made sense for where Pogba was at. Most in his shoes would want to get as far from Manchester as possible, and Juventus was somewhere he knew he’d thrived at.
And we know what happened now. If he simply didn’t want to be at United, he would’ve turned it on at Juventus. Instead, he played 224 minutes in all competitions as his body gave up on him. I am making no aspersions about the substance of his, ahem, substance abuse case. But factually speaking, this is someone who was struggling to get on the pitch. And now he’s done. It’s over.
Pogba won the World Cup, Serie A four times and the Europa League. His career just peaked in his early 20s. Is that a failure? Absolutely not. Is is a disappointment in some senses? Yes. He was always so close to being able to do everything that no one figured out the two or three things he should be doing. You can’t shake the sense that he could have achieved much more, but at the same time, he did give us plenty.
This piece kind of reminds me of your piece about Naby Keita and how big clubs don't really need "do everything" kind of midfielders, as much as they need guys who can do a couple of things really well.
Best article I have seen ever written of pogba. As a United fan who witnessed everything from 2011 👏🏿