Paul Pogba back at Manchester United? There’s a teaser headline to blow the internet.
It certainly caught the imagination of Rio Ferdinand. “I’d say to Pogba, ‘Come in and train with us, let me see what you’ve got’. I’d do that. I would have done that already. Come in and get fit.”
The dream, it seems, never dies. Indeed for some displaced souls it grows ever stronger, even in 32-year-olds and attendant sponsors.
As much as Ferdinand would like to put the Pogba band back together, the United where the fallen hero is most likely to land is, according to reports, the MLS version, DC, which would put him in the same zip code as Donald Trump. Pogba in the White House. You could sell tickets for that.
Pogba’s desire to go again is understandable following his disastrous return three years ago to Juve, where injury two weeks after arriving in Turin limited his playing time to just 161 minutes in his first season.
A four-year drug ban in 2023, reduced to 18 months, ended his second coming completely. Pogba eventually left Juventus last November and has been training since January, posting regular updates on Instagram, approved most prominently by his old United teammate Marcus Rashford.
Pogba is only 21 months younger than Kevin De Bruyne, the player who was welcomed to Manchester a year prior and who did for Manchester City what Pogba was supposed to do for United, anchor a decade of plunder at the top of the English game.
Peak De Bruyne is arguably the finest midfielder of the Premier League era with a claim to being the greatest in England’s top tier, period. Yet you could argue he did not have Pogba’s elite party moves, the quick feet, the powerful acceleration, the impressive physicality, which proves the gene pool is not the whole story in determining outcomes.
The great players make those around them better. Roy Keane, as well as being a very good player in his own right, evinced from his teammates the extra percentage points that made the difference in big games.
De Bruyne was even better than Keane and had the same impact on those around him. Watching Pogba it was hard to escape the sense that he was serving his own interests ahead of the team’s, that the great moments were a celebration not of the collective but of Pogba himself.
Pogba was essentially telling us how great he was rather than letting us decide for ourselves where he ranked. The social media posts offering the latest dance moves with Jesse Lingard might have been more palatable had they been commemorating a league title or two, less so for the Europa League or EFL Cup, both of which he won in his first season back at United.
Those two pots were, of course, seen as a measure of progress towards the ultimate prize. They turned out to be the entirety of his United collection.
Perhaps the most memorable Pogba contribution was at the Etihad during his second season, when his two-goal salvo fashioned an unlikely comeback victory.
It denied City the title against United but did not shift the centre of gravity. City went on to claim the first of six Premier League crowns under Pep Guardiola. United finished second and lost to Chelsea in the FA Cup final, which proved emblematic of the lost Pogba years, a period of expansive stumbling dotted by episodic eruptions.
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It was clear by then that there would be no resurrection under Mourinho, who himself would be gone eight months later citing Pogba as a malign influence, or as he reportedly put it, a virus.
How different it was when Mourinho announced the signing of Pogba at his own unveiling as Manchester United manager in 2016. It must have seemed to both that together they would conjure the alchemy that would reset United in the post Fergie era.
It would, said Mourinho’s predecessor, Louis van Gaal, take three years to bring the Premier League back to Old Trafford. Well, he’d used up two of them for the return of an FA Cup.
It would be left to Mourinho, powered by Pogba, to make United great again. Nine years on United have spiralled even further away from the centre of things. Pogba is a yet more distant planet moving in an altogether different orbit.
Four Serie A titles and a World Cup victory with France is hardly failing. Neither is it all it might have been when Pogba returned to Old Trafford the most expensive player on earth at just 23.
“I have been training by myself, but never giving up and always chasing my dream and what I want to achieve,” Pogba announced on Instagram. “Still hungry for the comeback,” he said. “I will see you very soon.”
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