MONACO — Had Paul Pogba taken a different path, he might have been part of the Manchester City squad facing AS Monaco in the UEFA Champions League on Wednesday. Instead, he’s waiting for a chance to restart his career with the Ligue 1 side more than two years after playing his last competitive game.
City were interested in signing Pogba in 2022 when he left Manchester United on a free transfer. Pep Guardiola was keen and Pogba was open to it, but the move never materialized.
A lot has happened since.
He eventually returned to Juventus after leaving Old Trafford, suffered a series of injuries that ruined his first season back in Turin and then failed a drugs test in September 2023. In March 2024, he was handed a four-year suspension. It was reduced to 18 months after a successful appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport allowing the midfielder to return to action in March 2025.
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After a mutual termination of his contract at Juventus, Pogba, now 32, agreed a two-year deal with AS Monaco in the summer.
He’s yet to make his comeback as he continues to build up his fitness after a hiatus of 759 days — he last saw game-time as a second-half substitute in a 2-0 win for Juventus at Empoli. He won’t make the squad to face Man City, with Monaco deciding over the summer that he needs at least three months on the training pitch before being considered for a return.
“We are following his plan,” said Monaco head coach Adi Hütter at a news conference on Tuesday. “We expected him maybe for the game against Nice [on Sunday] in the squad, but I think we have to postpone it for the game against Angers maybe.
“At the moment he’s doing more of the warming up, and also in small-sided games. Now he’s increasing a lot, he’s doing well at the moment, and I hope after the national team break he can be a part of the squad.”
The question remains, once he does play again, whether Pogba can return to anything like his best.
He hasn’t given up hope of a recall to the France squad ahead of the World Cup next summer. There is, though, a long way to go before that even becomes an outside possibility.
What Pogba’s “best” actually looks like is also up for debate.
It was against City that he put in probably his best performance in a United shirt, scoring twice in a 3-2 win in April 2018 that temporarily delayed Guardiola’s side winning the title. The performance was the type of which United thought they were getting when they splashed a then-world-record £89.3 million transfer fee to bring him back from Juventus in 2016.
Physically imposing and technically excellent, he was close to unplayable in the second half at the Etihad Stadium as United battled back from 2-0 down. The issue for then-manager Jose Mourinho was that Pogba didn’t do it often enough.
There was a sense of excitement from United fans in the summer of 2018 after he had helped France win the World Cup in Russia, scoring in the final against Croatia. Mourinho’s team finished second to City the previous season and there was a feeling that Pogba, newly crowned world champion, was ready to finally step up and take the Premier League by storm.
By then, however, Mourinho was already tiring of mis midfielder’s streaky form and, speaking at his first preseason news conference after the World Cup, he was in no mood to sugarcoat his feelings.
“I don’t think it’s about us getting the best out of him, it’s about him giving the best he has to give,” Mourinho told ESPN then. “I think the World Cup is the perfect habitat for a player like him to give [their] best.
“Why? Because it’s closed for a month, where he can only think about football. Where he’s with his team on the training camp, completely isolated from the external world, where they focus just on football, where the dimensions of the game can only motivate. During a season, you can have a big match then a smaller match, then one even smaller, then you can lose your focus, you can lose your concentration, then comes a big match again.”
It was a damning assessment of Pogba by Mourinho and one of a series of rifts between the pair during their two and a half years together at Old Trafford. At one point Mourinho stripped Pogba of the vice-captaincy. On another occasion they had a bust-up at an open training session in front of the television cameras.
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The day Mourinho was sacked in December 2018, Pogba posted a cryptic message on social media that appeared to mock the Portuguese coach’s dismissal. He insisted it was nothing more than a misunderstanding, but it didn’t go down well with the club’s hierarchy.
Smiling again under Mourinho’s replacement, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Pogba got 13 Premier League goals during the 2018-19 campaign. In the three seasons that followed, he managed a total of five.
Pogba has made just 12 senior appearances since leaving United in 2021.
On his return to Juventus — where he scored 34 goals in 178 games between 2012 and 2016 — he claimed he had come “home.” It quickly turned sour, and after testing positive for DHEA, a testosterone-enhancing supplement, he said that, rather than feeling support from the Serie A side, he felt as if he was fighting his club as much as the suspension itself.
Pogba was tearful after signing his contract with Monaco in July. He said pointedly that he was thankful for “the trust” they have placed in him having felt that much of the football world had turned their back after his ban.
At the end of his own social media post announcing the deal with Monaco, Pogba promised a “renaissance.”
It’s a long way back for a player who was once considered one of the best in the world. As his new club prepares for a Champions League showdown with City, he’s still waiting to take his first steps back toward center stage.
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