Sorry Paul, nobody’s sad to see you go!
COMMENTS SHOW JUST WHY REDS ARE BETTER OFF WITHOUT POGBA
WHEN Paul Pogba checks into his new surroundings in Turin ahead of next season, he will have plenty of motivation to make his second coming at Juventus a success.
The Frenchman looks certain to return to the Serie A giants in a career path that will confuse the Wikipedia trawlers in 20 or 30 years’ time.
The midfielder has now gone from United to Juventus to United and, soon, back to Juventus.
Juve are once again licking their wounds after a second successive season without a Scudetto, which is a far cry from Pogba’s last spell at the club which came during a run of nine successive league titles.
There have been only successive fourth-place finishes since then and the club are desperate to reclaim a title that has settled in Milan for the second year in a row.
Pogba will want to start stacking up his medal haul once again. In five disappointing years at Old Trafford he won only a Europa League and a League Cup and, for a player of his talents, that is a poor return.
But if thriving for his new, former club is a priority for Pogba, then it appears so is proving his old, old club they were wrong – even though he was the one who initiated a desire to leave three years ago.
“My thought process is to show Manchester that they made a mistake in waiting to give me a contract,” Pogba says in The Pogmentary, released on Amazon today.
“And to show other clubs that Manchester had made a mistake in not offering me a contract.”
There is plenty of fluff in Pogba’s self-serving film and his attempts to rewrite his own history with United is at the very top. His only public comment on his future in the past three years that gave any hint to his intentions was his statement that he wanted a ‘new challenge’ in the summer of 2019. Now he’s trying to paint his departure as something United could have avoided. There were much more pertinent questions that Pogba could have answered. Such as what position, exactly, did he think was his best for United? Why did he play so much better and look so much more invested with France? What did he think of Mino Raiola’s constant attempts to undermine the club and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer? We’ll probably never get the answer to these questions because it doesn’t suit ‘brand’ Pogba, as Rafaela Pimenta describes it in the film. What we will get to see next season is whether Pogba is good to his word that he will show United they ‘made a mistake.’ Given he’s
Nobody is shedding a tear for Pogba’s departure because in six years he hasn’t done enough to be missed
featured in less than 55 per cent of the club’s Premier League games in the last three years, simply being available would be a start.
The reality is he never found a position that suited him at Old Trafford and if Frenkie de Jong arrives to replace him, then United are getting someone younger and with a clearly defined role in this team. It will be quite an obvious upgrade. Perhaps Pogba will win another Serie A with Juventus and he’ll obviously go further than the Reds in the Champions League next season, but Italian teams have fared poorly in Europe’s elite competition recently and Juve are unlikely winners for the next couple of years, at least.
Rather than proving United were wrong, the situation is more likely to prove them right. Nobody is shedding a tear for Pogba’s departure because in six years he hasn’t done enough to make himself missed. Every United fan would rather have Frenkie de Jong in their midfield.