Only Pogba is to blame for his failure at United
Prodigiously gifted midfielder went missing in key matches and he will not be missed by the club’s disillusioned fans
There is much for which we can blame the hierarchy at Manchester United. The decaying state of Old Trafford, the thermonuclear temperature at which the pies are served, the length of Phil Jones’s last contract: the Glazers and their second-rate acolytes have their fingerprints all over the place.
But there is one thing for which they should not take responsibility: the sheer pointlessness of Paul Pogba, whose exit on a free transfer was confirmed yesterday.
Since he returned to the club in 2016 he has flittered and flickered, faffed and faltered, only occasionally offering any hint of the form he generally displays for France. Often injured, invariably uninterested, rarely seizing hold of a game in the manner his talent suggests he should, there has been for six long years a gaping hole where his influence should be.
This was a player apparently destined to challenge regularly for the Ballon d’or generally displaying all the upward trajectory of a lead balloon. Frankly, for most United fans, his long-mooted departure could not have come soon enough.
As ever, the true frustration with Pogba was the fleeting suggestions of brilliance. There were occasions in the 2020-21 season when, in conjunction with Edinson Cavani and Bruno Fernandes, he threatened to be everything his ability insisted he might be. Here was the man to grab the game by the collar and take control, the man to build a side around, who might finally restore the club to their position of prominence. But even then, in the critical moments, such as the Europa League final against Villarreal, he went missing when he should have been seizing the chance.
Watching him deliver four assists in the first Premier League game of last season was to be struck not so much by the excellence of his delivery as by the increasing certainty you were unlikely to see it again. This was a player for whom the concept of consistency was anathema. There are those who blame his noisy presence on social media. But while the haircuts and the tone-deaf lifestyle bragging might have been irritating from a player frequently failing to deliver, they were not the reason he underperformed.
It is not like a Seventies ladabout-town whose overindulgence in the pub had direct correlation to his performance. Being on Instagram a lot does not undermine physicality, however much Graeme Souness might like to suggest it does. The fact is Cristiano Ronaldo is hardly a model of self-deprecation on social media. But it could not be claimed his showing off is detrimental to his form. He might enjoy a lens pointed at him, but his priority so clearly remains his football. After the past six years at Old Trafford, Pogba would find it hard to make the same claim. Sure, there are voices who suggest he has not been properly handled, that smarter tacticians might have got a more consistent turn out of him, that he was not correctly utilised. But the fact is Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Ralf Rangnick all tried to play to his strengths yet all failed to extract anything like the sort of return expected from such a prodigious resource. This was a player with all the ability to write his name indelibly into the history of a great club. Instead, he leaves under a cloud of disappointment. Ferguson, along with Sir Matt Busby the finest developer of talent the club have ever known, quickly grew disillusioned with Pogba when he had him in the youth squad. The great manager, who knows a player when he sees one, was endlessly frustrated by the lack of application, by the noise from his agent, by the insistence that he should be entitled to huge returns when he had not yet delivered.
Sure, after Ferguson let him go, he thrived for a while at Juventus. But it seems absurd that no one at the club sought Ferguson’s great counsel when they forked out £86 million, plus tens of millions in inflated salary, to bring him back in 2016. They know now quite what an error that was.
And while it might be true to insist those in charge are not wholly to blame for his entirely forgettable time at United, to lose him not once but twice on a free transfer speaks volumes about poor stewardship.