Paul Pogba back and Paulo Dybala gone: ambitious Juventus get down to business in Serie A

The early lesson, loud and clear, from this summer’s transfer market, is that to go back to a previous employer is a step that needs careful thought. Cristiano Ronaldo wants to leave Manchester United, whom he rejoined last summer. Romelu Lukaku is curtailing his second spell at Chelsea after a single season back in London as their costly centre-forward.

Lukaku hopes that another back-to-the-future move, to the Inter Milan where he thrived up until 2021, will respark his career, and Inter have faith that Lukaku, rejoining them on loan, can make them Italian champions again.

Some of the same impulse drives Juventus, who are putting together the final stage directions for a second unveiling of Paul Pogba, a footballer whose career trajectory is becoming almost as famous for its boldly executed returns as Novak Djokovic’s forehand.

Pogba is to rejoin Juventus a decade after he first signed for them as a teenager, and will do so again having quit Manchester United, the club who paid what was, in the summer of 2016, a world record €105 million for a midfielder who left them for free to move to Turin four years earlier.

The imbalance of fees exchanged between the clubs – Juve will have captured Pogba twice as an out-of-contract free agent – hardly flatters United, who look back on their two Pogba episodes with mixed feelings.

Although they were astute in spotting him as a teenager and aggressive in initially luring him from Le Havre, their yield from what should have been his peak years was less than anticipated.

The closest he came to winning a Premier League title was as a 19-year-old, then on the fringes of the United first-team, when United missed out to Manchester City on the last day of the dramatic 2011-12 season, by