Paul Pogba's rollercoaster career hits new low after Juventus drug test suspension

Absent, as he has been for 18 months now, from France’s internationals, Paul Pogba took the opportunity of last week’s international pause to give a rare interview.

Opening up to Al Jazeera, he reflected on some of the difficulties in a challenging year professionally and personally: “Sometimes I was by myself, thinking ‘I don’t want to play any more'," he said to camera.

Barely had the interview been broadcast when Italy’s Anti-Doping Agency announced that the World Cup-winning midfielder, who has played 91 times for France, had returned a positive test for synthetic testosterone in a routine doping sample taken after the opening game of the Serie A season at Udinese, where Pogba had been a non-playing substitute for his club, Juventus.

He is provisionally suspended with immediate effect, pending the results of a second examination of the sample. If Pogba is found to have intentionally doped, he faces a four-year ban.

The player’s agent, Rafaela Pimenta, has insisted: “What is sure is that Paul Pogba never meant to break any rules. We will await the counter-analysis.” Results from that are expected within the week.

The episode confronts Pogba with the possibility of his time in the elite tier of his sport coming to a sudden end. He turned 30 earlier in March, while at the lowest ebb of a career that began with precocious promise in his teens and reached the heights with his stirring role in France’s triumph at the 2018 World Cup.

He had then just completed the second year of his second spell at Manchester United, having cost what was then a world-record transfer fee – €105 million – when United, who first recruited him as 16-year-old, bought him back from Juventus.

The pattern of his club career then repeated, with last