Paul Pogba, an inconsistent footballer who had to leave an inconsistent football club

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Paul Pogba is leaving Manchester United again, a player whose biggest flaw became too visible at a club that couldn’t afford inconsistency.

In the end, the departure was treated just as any other might be. ‘Once a Red, always a Red’, said the Manchester United Twitter account, as Paul Pogba left Old Trafford for the second, and we might assume to be final, time. But as this latest spell with the club ends as unhappily as the first, was Paul Pogba ever really ‘a Red’, and how did the coming together of one of the biggest clubs on the planet and a player so lavishly talented that he’s capable of bending the course of a game to his will end up working out for neither party?

This isn’t, of course, the first time we’ve been here. Pogba’s relationship with the club was controversial from the outset. When he first arrived at Old Trafford from Le Havre in 2009, his former side stated that, ‘The player and his parents refused to keep the arrangement because Manchester United offered very high sums of money to the parents with the aim of obtaining the transfer of their son’. United were cleared of poaching Pogba from Le Havre, but a feeling of ill will remained.

Pogba’s first spell with Manchester United ended three years later amid similar acrimony, with the player