I have never believed in holding on to a player who clearly wants to be elsewhere.
His disaffection must show itself in the locker room, the gym, on the training pitch, outside club time (is there such a thing?) when playing Xbox games with team mates and potential team mates. It creates an increasing risk of rubbing off on others (which could easily include Martial, Rashford and Lingard) and it becomes hugely time-consuming for coaches and management.
This a point in time when we need everyone from the cook and physio, through the coaching team, the squad, senior management and PR team to be focused on making our players as good as they possibly can be and being totally motivated to perform every week at their best for the team, club and fans. Whether Pogba wants to go to Real, Barca, Juve, Plymouth Argyle or Aberystwyth should be a total irrelevance and not up for discussion, but it keeps resurfacing.
By now, when he's in the second half (i.e. the beginning of the downhill bit) of his career, fans, coaches and pundits are debating where and how to play him. Really? Did we need to ponder where Keano should play? Or Scholes? No. World class players make a role their own. They want to be first name on the team sheet, they do what it takes to earn that privilege and they fight to retain it. Pogba does none of these things. He isn't able to stamp his presence or authority (or legacy) on a specific position week in and week out, which is what class players do.
We may be giving him game time in the hope that the football equivalent of the tooth fairy will visit one night and turn him into the player we thought we were buying. Alternatively, we might see his time on the pitch as a shop window to attract decent bids. Good luck there, currently.
My recommendation would be to make it known widely that we don't want him any longer and we are willing to do a swap, citing the positions where we would consider taking players in return for offloading him. I'd rather have two or three decent new faces in defence or upfront if it means getting a bad apple out of the barrel.
Then, everyone can get back to the day job, which is still winning stuff, by the way.
His disaffection must show itself in the locker room, the gym, on the training pitch, outside club time (is there such a thing?) when playing Xbox games with team mates and potential team mates. It creates an increasing risk of rubbing off on others (which could easily include Martial, Rashford and Lingard) and it becomes hugely time-consuming for coaches and management.
This a point in time when we need everyone from the cook and physio, through the coaching team, the squad, senior management and PR team to be focused on making our players as good as they possibly can be and being totally motivated to perform every week at their best for the team, club and fans. Whether Pogba wants to go to Real, Barca, Juve, Plymouth Argyle or Aberystwyth should be a total irrelevance and not up for discussion, but it keeps resurfacing.
By now, when he's in the second half (i.e. the beginning of the downhill bit) of his career, fans, coaches and pundits are debating where and how to play him. Really? Did we need to ponder where Keano should play? Or Scholes? No. World class players make a role their own. They want to be first name on the team sheet, they do what it takes to earn that privilege and they fight to retain it. Pogba does none of these things. He isn't able to stamp his presence or authority (or legacy) on a specific position week in and week out, which is what class players do.
We may be giving him game time in the hope that the football equivalent of the tooth fairy will visit one night and turn him into the player we thought we were buying. Alternatively, we might see his time on the pitch as a shop window to attract decent bids. Good luck there, currently.
My recommendation would be to make it known widely that we don't want him any longer and we are willing to do a swap, citing the positions where we would consider taking players in return for offloading him. I'd rather have two or three decent new faces in defence or upfront if it means getting a bad apple out of the barrel.
Then, everyone can get back to the day job, which is still winning stuff, by the way.
