2023-09-13 17:25:27
At the end of August, the Blues coach was questioned about the case of his midfielder Paul Pogba, who has been absent from the selection for almost two years. Didier Deschamps had been pleasant (“Yes, Paul is still a player on the France team”), quite clear nonetheless (“He is coming out of such a complicated year, between his injuries and his extra-sporting problems, we have to that he finds all his means… I want Paul in the French team if it’s Paul”), and those present warmed up to one of the most worthy customs of the environment: the politeness due to those who have enormously given. Do not close the door too hard. Save what remains to be saved. At this stage, little more than the ego of the international tricolor.
Since Monday September 11, nothing remains. In the morning, in a dark interview given to the Qatari channel Al-Jezira, the 30-year-old player let his torments shine through: “Football is cruel. You can accomplish something great, the next day you’re nobody.” Returning to the kidnapping and extortion affair between him, among other protagonists, and his brother Mathias, Paul Pogba says that “it was like in a film. Money changes people. It can break up a family, it can create a war. Sometimes I was alone thinking, “I don’t want any more money. I don’t want to play anymore, I just want to be with normal people who love me for who I am, not for fame or money.'” At the start of the evening, he was suspended by his club Juventus Turin. Following urine analyzes carried out in the Roman laboratory of Acquacetosa, the ultimate in the fight against doping in Italy, the player was announced positive for testosterone (an anabolic steroid) during a match played by the Piedmontese team in Udine on August 20.
No matter the bottle
That day, Pogba did not leave the sidelines. If he is, according to Deschamps, still a player on the French team, the native of Lagny-sur-Marne (Seine-et-Marne) is no longer a football player: 213 minutes of play in 2023, for a only tenure. During this one, on May 14, he lasted 24 minutes before being let go by his hamstring. Transferred to Juventus in August 2022, he had not worn the Turin jersey the last four months of the year, nor had he participated in the Qatari World Cup in the winter of 2022-2023. On Monday, the player’s agent, Rafaela Pimenta, pushed away with all force the specter of a player in dire straits, using expedients to get out of the tunnel of the physical problems (ankle, long Covid, knee, ischios) which fell on him since the Blues’ world title in 2018: “What is certain is that Paul never wanted to break the rules.”
Way of not contesting the facts too strongly so as to slide into the terrain of intentionality, almost impossible to establish and which transforms four years of suspension into a few months if the player pleads imprudence and we want to believe him. Tuesday morning, Paul Pogba arrived at the Juventus training center in Vinovo with the vials containing the food supplement which, according to his version, contains the substance which made him appear on the radars of the Italian anti-doping agency. Extraordinary thing: that same day, while the Italian Nazionale was playing against the Ukrainian selection in the Euro 2024 qualifiers in Germany, Pogba dominated the front pages of all the country’s sports newspapers.
Kite without string
This is because he has not become an object of long-term fascination, thanks to his sporting development, even if his audience has of course changed in scale. Pogba was born into football, already famous. Or rather radiant, as one of those who had spotted him on a playground, during a detection, told us before directing him towards the Le Havre training center. “The test consisted of organizing lots of small six-on-six matches simultaneously and often changing the team players, to see how they adapt to different contexts,” we were told in 2014. Pogba was heavy . Slow. Not too bad with the ball, but technically there were others much better than him. Something struck us: every time you changed teams, his new teammates organized themselves around him. He was always in the center. It happened naturally. Good, average or bad, either way you only saw him.” The definition of charisma, the story of the silence that occurs in a room where a stranger enters. Which he didn’t stay for long. For the better, but not only that.
During his first call-up in blue, in March 2013, he arrived at Clairefontaine flanked by his agent at the time, while player representatives were banned from the premises. Called to order, he pleads innocence. Deschamps has no reason not to believe him. The idea of a kite without strings capable of shaking up the fragile collective or media balances without much premeditation is already taking hold. “During the 2014 Brazilian World Cup, Didier [Deschamps] has everything under control, a member of the French staff explained to us. The image of the Blues, the sportsman… frankly, nothing could happen. The only time I felt Didier uncomfortable was when Pogba came to take his turn in front of the press. There, it could go in all directions. Even Pogba is incapable of knowing what he will say in the next minute.
“Pogba is an exception, and we handle an exception differently”
From then on, a fool’s game will take place on the sidelines of the French gatherings and even beyond. While he became the highest paid player in England in Manchester (336,000 euros per week according to Daily Mail) and switches to show off, between “Pogmaison” (we quote) completely baroque equipped with a “Pogbar” or an authentic “Pogsalle de cinéma” with around thirty folding velvet armchairs, Deschamps, who finished to tempt the devil, makes him invisible. No question of approaching a microphone. Or only within the controlled framework of detailed TV reports.
So here he is in a series of interviews for Canal + in a wine-colored suit on a privatized floor of the Eiffel Tower, contemplating Paris at his feet, promising lots of fun (“we’re going to blow everything”) and dreaming high voice of the crowds who, in fact, three months later, will invade the streets of the capital on the night of July 15 to 16, 2018 to celebrate the victory of the Blues at the Russian World Cup. Megalomania having no meaning at these altitudes, the French staff explains the text behind the scenes: the problem is not what Pogba has to say, but the difference between his perception of himself and what the audience is ready to hear. Deschamps will have the following words: “Pogba is an exception, and we manage an exception differently.”
Creator or assault tank
The idea of a player in exile from himself, with no other relationship to reality than that of his sport, is set up, while the outside world fantasizes, based on Instagram publications, a slightly rebellious eccentric, capable of testing the system according to the mysterious currents that push it. A flattering perception which exploded during the Russian World Cup, and it is not forbidden to think that it was for the best. Driven by the desire not to leave the media field to Kylian Mbappé alone, the French executives are pushed forward and Paul Pogba then appears a little naked, hesitant, still terrified by the 105 million euros that Manchester United spent two years earlier to make him come. “In fact, that’s when my life completely changed,” he concedes at a press conference. The rabbit in the car headlights.
But there is something else. At the very end of the competition, three days before the victorious final (4-2) against the Croatian Vatreni in Moscow, Pogba explained that he had no idea what he was doing on the pitch. A deep, existential dismay. Which has its source in the gap between the way he sees himself, a creator with the technical skill and fantasy of a street player, and what Deschamps, and other coaches before or after him, perceive: a destroyer 1.91 m tall, between the deterrent force and the assault tank, far from the mild climates where the international has always dreamed of. A career as a blind player, the outstretched hand of teammates like a thread of life (“come back”, “put yourself there”…) and an existence where none of the three pieces of the puzzle ever fit together: the way in which he sees himself, the gaze of others and what his own body, torn from everywhere, allows him to do.
It’s an understatement to say that his body is regaining its rights through the injuries which, from 2019, no longer give him any respite. For the rest, Paul Pogba is for everyone a controversial player, a little vague, capable of coming out of the round of 16 of Euro 2021 lost against the Swiss (3-3, 4-5 on penalties) under the cheers from an audience dazzled by his charisma and technique, even though he did not recover a single ball for two hours. A shame for a midfielder, which indicates that he thinks he is someone else. Except that this other is himself. After his body, it is the outside world that will get its hands on Pogba.
“Not the kind of guy you’d trust with your car keys”
The blackmail and extortion affair that caught up with him in 2022, made up of hooded and armed men who present an invoice for 13 million euros (including arrears) to the player as the price of their “protection” in an apartment void where the player was attracted by acquaintances, will at least have brought him back into the common of footballers: that of an underworld, linked since childhood to the player, watered for years under the cover of “services” or “foundations » more or less tangible or real, to which Pogba, thanks to a change of agent (Mino Raiola, his historical representative, died in April 2022) decides to cut off supplies, triggering the fury of his former debtors, who put his family – and his brother Mathias, incarcerated and then released – under pressure.
We will still learn that Pogba commissioned a marabout to cast a spell on Kylian Mbappé, undoubtedly because of his propensity to take (all) the light. Pogba denied it, Mbappé pretended nothing. And Tuesday, on the sidelines of the defeat (1-2) of the French team in Germany, Kingsley Coman and Deschamps supported the Juve player without ambiguity, the coach being the most talkative: “I spoke briefly with him [mardi] and we will have the opportunity later to be able to find out, but I am not sure that he knows exactly what is happening to him.”
From part of the Blues locker room, we often perceived a certain tenderness towards their teammate, his vigor and his joie de vivre (as well as an emotional closeness with Antoine Griezmann) having also earned him to be dressed in leader, a little quickly or superficially for some people’s taste. Someone close to the selection: “He’s not the kind of guy you’d entrust your car keys to either.” Juventus Turin, which suspended his salary, has so far refrained from making the slightest comment of support towards Pogba. Contractually, the club can terminate the contract of a player guilty of doping. At the rate of 8 million euros in annual salary for someone who does not play, it is a scenario which could prove tempting for the Piedmontese leaders.
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