The question of the right to a second chance has always animated public debate. Its subjective aspect has served to sustain it. A topic on which everyone has an opinion, but to which no one is able to provide an absolute truth.
The case of Paul Pogba is no exception to the rule.
Almost two years after playing his last official match, in September 2023, the French midfielder is finally preparing to return to the green rectangle. The end of a ‘nightmare’, as he himself described it, from which the world champion almost never woke up.
It has to be said that the last few months for the player with 91 caps for the French national team have not been all plain sailing. Tested positive for dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), a substance that increases testosterone and is on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) list of banned substances, in August 2023, then suspended for four years by the Italian Anti-Doping Office (NADO) six months later, Pogba’s sentence was finally reduced to 18 months after his appeal was heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) last October.
A liberation for the then 31-year-old player, having in the meantime left Juve by mutual consent, who has never ceased to plead the involuntary nature of the ingestion of the product contained in food supplements.
Now allowed to return to competitive football, Pogba intends to ‘follow his dreams again’ at AS Monaco, where he recently signed a two-year contract. An ideal destination for the native of Lagny-sur-Marne, who will have the opportunity both to play in the Champions League with the Monegasques and to discover Ligue 1, where he has never played in his career.
“I can’t wait,” he told the club’s media. “It’s true that I’ve never played in Ligue 1. It’s always been a league that I’ve respected, with lots of great players and players with great potential. “I think the best talent in the world today comes out of France. Coming to play in this league is a pleasure and an honour for me.”
But making his mark in Ligue 1 is just the first step on a much bigger objective for the former Bianconero.
A key figure in Les Bleus’ world title triumph in 2018, Pogba saw his dream of a golden double dashed just a few days before the start of the 2022 edition. The blame lay with a recalcitrant knee injury contracted a few months earlier, which the midfielder had tried to fight off.
In vain.
It was a disappointment that the 32-year-old now intends to build on, as he dreams of returning to the French national team… and the World Cup.
But what chance does he really have?
If the only criterion for selection depended on a player’s talent, then Pogba would certainly be one of the first to climb the steps of the Clairefontaine castle next September. But talent is not everything. And it is against himself that Pogba is preparing to wage the toughest battle.
Because to perform well, you need to be able to play one match after another. In fact, you have to be able to play a single match in its entirety. Suspension aside, you have to go back to March 12, 2022, to find traces of the last 90 full minutes played by the Frenchman.
At that time, Pogba was still playing for Manchester United. Cristiano Ronaldo, who scored a hat-trick against Tottenham Hotspur that day, too.
Two years later, by the time his sanction was announced, the midfielder had played just 19 more games. And only six of those as a starter. A meagre record that can be explained in part by the number of injuries the Frenchman has suffered in recent seasons. And that was well before the match mentioned against Spurs. Since the start of the 2019-20 season, Pogba has had to sit out a total of 147 matches to deal with physical problems. Both for club and country.
His last appearance for France came on March 29, 2022, against South Africa. In other words, an eternity ago. But Pogba is a special player, one who knows where he wants to go. And above all, what it will take to get there.
“In my thirteen years in the business, I’ve worked with a lot of athletes, but he was one of the most motivated people I’ve ever met,” explained Roger Caibe Rodriguez, his individual fitness trainer, to L’Équipe, who believes that the 32-year-old will need “a few weeks, once the championship starts”, to make a real return to competition.
So if Pogba manages to rediscover his superb form, Didier Deschamps’s decision to re-open the doors of the French national team to him would no longer be purely hypothetical. Especially since the two men have never broken off contact in recent months.
“I talk to him, I say things to him,” admitted the French coach at a press conference in March. “It’s his life, his career. He has the ability to get back to the best level. It’s not going to happen by snapping his fingers.”
These comments obviously echo those revealed by Pogba a few months earlier.
“He said to me: ‘Paul, you have to work, you have to work. When I tell you to work, it means you have to redouble your efforts’. And I told him yes, I know all about it,” Pogba told RMC. “And that’s it, you’ve been given that chance. So it’s work, work, work. And he’s absolutely right. That’s what I like, this openness. We have this relationship where he can be frank and say ‘Boy, that’s all well and good, Paul Pogba, that’s all well and good, you’re back, they’ve reduced your suspension, but you’ve got to work, boy'”.
And as Deschamps reminds us, Pogba is going to have to work even harder than the others. For the simple reason that others have taken advantage of his absence to earn a place in the France squad.
Since his last match for Les Bleus, no fewer than 11 players have come and gone in the French midfield. Some, like N’Golo Kante and Aurélien Tchouaméni, had already established themselves there before that, while others, like Warren Zaire-Emery and Manu Kone, celebrated their first cap afterwards. So the competition has increased, but it has also struggled to convince.
Does this augur well for a return in the near future? Possibly.
But Pogba knows that the sweet story of his return alone will not be enough to convince Deschamps to recall him. All that remains is for the new Monegasque to prove to Deschamps that he still has something to contribute to a France team in the midst of a rejuvenation programme.
And that’s all there is to it.
