That first training session. Has ever a training session been so romanticised and mythologised as Paul Pogba’s first for Juventus in 2012? Is there a training session you would rather have been there to see in the flesh? “He is not real,” Giorgio Chiellini remembers thinking as they watched their new teenage magician at work. “Are they blind in Manchester?” Gigi Buffon exclaimed. “We were just laughing in total disbelief,” Andrea Pirlo later wrote. “That a player with so much obvious quality was able to leave a club the size of Manchester United for free.”
Well, you can write your own joke there. And yet as United prepare to part ways with Pogba for a second time, having spent almost £90m to buy him back, you will find very few at the club who feel even the slightest twinge of regret. “Fuck off,” the United fans roared at him as he was substituted against Norwich last week, six years of bottled frustration finally finding its voice. This will, in all likelihood, be Pogba’s epitaph at United: a profligate indulgence, an expensive failure, a player who can be safely jettisoned with the minimum of fuss.
