Paul Pogba’s wasted prime should be a cause for sadness, not scorn

That first training session. Has ever a training session been so romanticised and mythologised as Paul Pogba’s first for Juventus in 2012? Is there a training session you would rather have been there to see in the flesh? “He is not real,” Giorgio Chiellini remembers thinking as they watched their new teenage magician at work. “Are they blind in Manchester?” Gigi Buffon exclaimed. “We were just laughing in total disbelief,” Andrea Pirlo later wrote. “That a player with so much obvious quality was able to leave a club the size of Manchester United for free.”

Well, you can write your own joke there. And yet as United prepare to part ways with Pogba for a second time, having spent almost £90m to buy him back, you will find very few at the club who feel even the slightest twinge of regret. “Fuck off,” the United fans roared at him as he was substituted against Norwich last week, six years of bottled frustration finally finding its voice. This will, in all likelihood, be Pogba’s epitaph at United: a profligate indulgence, an expensive failure, a player who can be safely jettisoned with the minimum of fuss.

At which point it is probably necessary to urge a little pause for reflection. Yes, this is probably for the best. No, an increasingly injury-prone 29-year-old on £200,000 a week is probably not the best man to have hanging around the place as you begin a cultural reset under a new manager. But the predominant emotion here should be not relief or vindictiveness but sadness: that English football never really saw the best of a player who really could do it all.

It all feels like hyperbole now, but it wasn’t. When Pirlo warned that “football should get ready for a new king”, or Patrick Vieira described him as “the next great