Paul Pogba’s targeting by criminals is a human tragedy, he needs support

I t is seven years since Paul Pogba joined Manchester United from Juventus for a then world-record fee of £89m. He was 23 and had already won four Serie A titles. He had been named young player of the tournament at the previous World Cup. He was a star on the rise, the sort of player who might conceivably drag United out of their post-Alex Ferguson slump.

Pogba had apparently only one fault: he seemed a player out of time, a box-to-box midfielder in an age that had outgrown them. Midfields had split into two bands, and he didn’t quite have the tight technical ability to play in the more advanced line, receiving the ball often with his back to goal, but wasn’t quite disciplined enough to operate consistently as a holder (which, anyway, felt a waste of his profound creative gifts). What he needed was to operate on the left of the midfield three as he had at Juve, but that was not how United played. That quibble, though, was only the start of it.

Since 2016, that moment of peak possibility, the Pogba story has been of disappointment. It began, perhaps, with his first interview, in which he said his dream was to win the Ballon d’Or. That seemed a worryingly modern attitude, speaking not of team goals, of winning the Premier League or the Champions League, but of individual glory. Performances were inconsistent. The old grey football men began to obsess about his hair, although the question of whether he was worth it faded the following summer when Paris Saint-Germain more than doubled the transfer record to sign Neymar.

There were highs – a goal in the final as he won the World Cup with France, a Europa League triumph with United, four assists in a game against Leeds – but there were far more lows: an awkward relationship