Paul Pogba's career reaches an almost inevitable denouement

A series of injuries followed by a positive test for excess testosterone might be a little too on the nose as the end of career for a player best defined by mixed decision-making.

It is one of the more peculiar unwritten rules of modern football that nothing is ever enough any more. Celebrate winning a match, and the celebration police will pontificate about every last one of your movements. Score a lot of goals, and it won’t be worth anything unless you’ve won a trophy. Win a trophy, and you’ll be accused of not having won a ‘more important’ one. Win all the trophies and you’ll be accused of not having won all of them on enough occasions.

The horizons of what can be achieved within the game seem to be constantly narrowing, available only to an ever-diminishing cast of characters. This toxic trope is at its most damaging when it comes to new players. It might not be in a player’s best interests to sign for a gargantuan megaclub at a given time. The history of the game is littered with the remnants of the careers of those who did. And if you do end up at a gargantuan megaclub, don’t be fancying that they’ll ‘love’ you. Because while that word might be thrown around a lot, it ain’t love.

A lot of the discourse surrounding football talks of ‘love’ because the game itself has never really managed to find a different lexicon through which it can express this love-like emotion. But don’t be fooled, because this isn’t love. How could it be, when it’s so transactional and conditional? Lionel Messi wasn’t ‘loved’ by Barcelona supporters because he had a face that suggested that he’d be ideal for casting in a stage production of Wind in the Willows. He was ‘loved’ because he’s one of the greatest footballers of all time, and scored literally hundreds of goals over hundreds of appearances for their team.

Football’s worldwide popularity may, in some small way, be influenced by the fact that it sits at the exact intersection of the rational and the irrational. In one sense, it is a game that is easy to compute, easy to take in and easy to explain. You can apply science or statistics to it and sound very clever indeed; particularly within the game, where formal education is still rarer than it is in the outside world. We can all sit and watch a football match and come away from it with a rough idea of why one team won and why one team lost.

But in another sense, football is completely irrational and makes no sense whatsoever. It inflames the hearts of people to a point at which they will act in ways which make no sense whatsoever. For all of the attempts that coaches have attempted to make to fit the game into tactical straitjackets, it remains the case that what can definitively win or lose a match remains elusive. You can teach a good player to be a better player, but you can’t teach a bad player to be a good player. Something about having that ability comes from somewhere else.

All of which is a somewhat long-winded way of getting round to a player who divided opinion, has stood accused of having ‘wasted’ his career despite having won the World Cup, four domestic league championships, the Europa League and various other domestic trophies, as well as the highest order of merit, either civilian or military, in the country of his birth. Paul Pogba won more silverware in his career than 99% of professional players could ever hope to achieve. But it was never enough.

It now seems likely that his playing career will finally be curtailed by a FIFA ban for doping (a four-year ban at almost 31 years of age would indicate that he’s reached the end of that particular road, at least in a meaningful sense), which has only poured further fuel onto the career-long accusations of indolence and insolence that followed him around for years, when the counter to argument to this might be that in having decided to spend the best years of his career shuttling between Manchester United and Juventus, the worst ‘crime’ of which he could have been reasonably accused was probably bad decision-making.

The lion’s share of Pogba’s playing career seems to have been taken up with all involved forgetting the lessons of the recent past. Why, when he’d previously left Manchester United for Juventus having refused a new contract at Old Trafford, did United throw £90m-odd at him again in 2016? How was it allowed that he just walked away from United again for no fee when his contract was up again in 2022?

Manchester United aren’t the only ginormoclub with questions to answer here. What sort of due diligence did Juventus do when they brought him back in 2020? Losing any player who cost a lot of money for nothing is never an ideal position for a football club to find itself in; did Juve not note the relative lack of disappointment on the part of United supporters when he walked away for nothing again? Why did everybody in this story just repeat exactly the same behaviour as just a few years earlier?

It is absolutely fair to say that there were times when Pogba himself could act like his own worst enemy. Deciding not to get surgery on his torn meniscus in 2022 was an error of judgement, but this was compounded by posting a photograph of himself at a ski resort while recovering from that injury. It may have been a perfectly sensible decision for him to be somewhere like this, and it seems unlikely that he would have been skiing.

But the risk of interrupting his recovery from that injury wasn’t even really the point. The point was that the optics for this were obviously and entirely predictably terrible, but again… no filter seemed to have been applied. The same could be said for that time a few years earlier when he talked about his ambition being to win the Ballon d’Or rather than the Premier League or the Champions League when he first returned to Manchester United. Players are fully entitled to set their personal ambitions wherever they like, of course, but you’re not supposed to say the quiet part that loudly or publicly.

Was the criticism that Pogba faced throughout his career racist? Well, that’s a loaded question. There’s little question that Black players are subjected to a level of scrutiny that their white peers often don’t seem to be, and it’s equally fair to say that much of the criticism aimed at the player over the years—in particular the repeat allegation that he’s ‘lazy’—ran parallel to some fairly long-standing racial slurs. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Black players are held to higher standards than their white counterparts, and it certainly felt at times that there were always daggers drawn for him in some quarters, no matter what he did.

There remains a glimmer of hope for him. He maintains his innocence and has a right of appeal. Should that be successful, at 31 years of age he wouldn’t be without suitors from somewhere. But while it would be easy to talk about the way in which his career has panned out in similar terms to some sort of tragedy, to do so would be somewhat misleading. After all, he was a champion in Italy four years in a row. He won the World Cup and the Europa League, and has made almost 300 appearances in the Premier League and Serie A, as well as 91 appearances for France. It might not have been ‘enough’ for those who sought to denigrate him or put a burden of weight upon his shoulders, but it certainly feels as though it was also… enough.