IN THE LONG and ignoble history of football punditry, few obsessions have been as idiotic as that with Paul Pogba’s hair.
There was a time during his time with Manchester United when no panel discussion about Pogba was complete without some discussion about his hair, of how its styling was someone symptomatic of a guy who didn’t care enough about hard work.
We’re going to shock you here: Pogba’s haircuts made literally zero impact on his performances for Manchester United. They had as much relevance to proceedings on the pitch at Old Trafford as the colour of opposition kits, or Fred the Red.
Pogba styled his hair to stand apart and to articulate something about himself, and given how much he had to listen other people talk about him, how could you blame him?
The commentary around Pogba’s haircuts always revealed more about those who criticised him. It spoke to English football’s enduring suspicion of the individual, and of the outsider. For all its advancements, football in England is spoken about in pseudo-military language, evident in the persistence of outdated words and concepts like “wages”, “skipper”, and “gaffer.” (Today it’s really all about net salaries, leadership groups, and head coaches working in a collaborative structure.)
Pogba was a kind of flamboyant individualist. He wasn’t one to march in step with the grim-faced, close-cropped soldiers around him, which was then thrown at him whenever he or United underperformed.
Pogba’s exit has shown that he wasn’t actually solely responsible for the dysfunction at United, but he has bigger problems to worry about now.
This week he was banned from football for four years, having tested positive for elevated levels of testosterone.
Pogba insists he did not knowingly ingest any performance enhancing substances, and will go to CAS to clear his name. (He may have been encouraged by Tuesday’s decision on Simona Halep.)
But as it stands, his career at the top level of the game is over. He won’t be able to return to the game until 2027, at which point he will be 34.
Once again, the reaction to Pogba has been instructive as it reveals something about the culture in which he has played.
It has at once laid bare the extreme demands placed on elite footballers nowadays, while also betraying the game’s curiously soft attitude to doping and failed tests.
Following news of the four-year ban, Garth Crooks of the BBC wept that Pogba ” robbed us of his genius” too often, while his highest-profile critic, Graeme Souness, said his reaction to the drugs ban was “only sadness.”
Souness went on to say that he chastised Pogba not because he hated him, but because he believed in his talent.
“I criticised him to such a substantial degree – and take no satisfaction from saying I was proved right – because I could see that huge potential”, wrote Souness in his Daily Mail column. “I saw the kind of player he could become.”
(It would be interesting to hear if Pogba agrees that Souness’ flow of invective sprung from a well of benevolence buried so deep it might only have been found using sonar waves.)
The idea Pogba is an avatar for wasted talent is nonsense.
The most obvious riposte is his CV. Here’s a guy who won the World Cup, scoring a goal in the final. He has also won four Serie A titles, two Coppa Italias, one Europa League, and one English League Cup. He also won the Nations League with France and played in the Euro 2016 final.
That’s a stunning medal haul, but one which has been devalued by the Messi/Ronaldo industrial complex that has bled into how the game is covered. Their achievements have been so outlandish, their pursuit of medals and goals and records so unfathomably relentless, that we have allowed it to condition what we expect of everyone else nowadays. Messi and Ronaldo are outliers and should be treated as such, rather than yardsticks for everyone else.
Plus, could Pogba really have achieved much more than he did? He is, in many ways, an anachronism. He is a luminous individual talent with outrageous technique, but the weakest part of his game is his tactical understanding, a quality more important now than ever before.
Pogba might actually have been better suited to the more rudimentary age in which many of his critics played, but his peak coincided with the extreme sophistication of the game, in which every player must submit to the intricate patterns and demands of the manager. It’s hardly a coincidence Pogba was most effective at international level, which remains a more improvisational than club football. And even there, his lack of tactical awareness by the awesome engine of N’Golo Kante, who could do Pogba’s running for him.
So given the faults and limitations in Pogba’s game, his trophy yield is pretty good.
While demanding too much of its players, football is also remarkably incurious about the lengths at which players will go to meet those demands.
Confirmation of Pogba’s failed drugs test has largely been met by a lament for his career, rather than the righteous anger which meets many other dopers. Athletes, swimmers, and cyclists who fail tests are widely shunned. Few are given the elegy that has been delivered for Pogba.
History has shown that testing can only do so much to deter the use of PEDs: it must be upheld by a general moral code, the transgression of which leads to a kind of excommunication. While it may be possible to feel sympathy for individual athletes who must serve long bans, that moral line must be held because, otherwise, why are we doing any of this?
Football, however, has shown little obvious interest in holding that line.
Edmund Wilson, writing for The Daily Mail in April 2022, revealed that 15 Premier League footballers failed a drugs test between 2015 and 2020, but none of them served a ban.
Wilson also writes a substack, and last month reported that there have been 13 positive tests in Spanish football since 2017, but only two served bans. He also revealed the Spanish anti-doping agency has collected zero blood samples from La Liga footballers in three of the last four years.
There has been curiously little coverage of this. Imagine the outcry if the same had been true of athletics, or cycling? Those sports may have a doping problem, but they at least appear to be governed by a moral rejection of doping.
The reaction to Pogba’s failed test is another reason to ask: does football hold itself to the same standard?