Milan’s narrow victory in Turin sealed a top-four finish but for Juventus the scandal over alleged false accounting rolls onIt should have been blood and thunder, two of Italian football’s biggest clubs squaring off on the penultimate weekend with Champions League football on the line. Juventus and Milan instead gave us dull, with blunders, in front of a listless crowd.Significant sections of the Allianz Stadium were empty at kick-off. Fewer than 500 Milan supporters had made the short trip to Turin, others balking at the €80 ticket price in the away section. Juventus Ultras from the Curva Sud, meanwhile, were staging a protest outside against what they perceive as heavy-handed treatment from their club, including restrictions on flags, banners and...
Midfielder deserves football’s understanding for the kidnapping and threats that are damaging his life and careerIt 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...
While few would claim Pogba has been a success at Manchester United, his decline reflects the deep dysfunction at the clubThat 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...
The £89m midfielder showed off his remarkable passing range in racking up four assists during a 5-1 demolition at Old TraffordIt was a chance to display new acquisitions. Manchester United led the way, parading Raphaël Varane on the pitch before kick-off, using a quadruple Champions League winner and a 2018 world champion as proof of their largesse. Leeds produced an idiosyncratic response. Enter Marcelo Bielsa, soon to perch on a new bucket.Unlike the other United, Bielsa has never been a slave to the transfer market. He believes that improvement comes from within, aided by relentless running. Luke Ayling has symbolised it. He was a right-back in the lower half of the Championship when Bielsa inherited him, and a scorer of...
Manchester United midfielder’s game relies on a functioning collective, and he is shining with fewer touches and shotsWhen Paul Pogba was about nine or 10, a man called Sambou Tati – his youth coach at US Roissy – decided to convert him from a striker into a midfielder. At the time, Pogba was a brilliant footballer with one glaring weakness: he loved the ball so much he would simply dribble and dribble with it for as long as he could. By moving further back, Tati reasoned, Pogba might have less time on the ball, but would offer greater influence on the team as a whole.Although he probably didn’t know it, in so doing Tati had established an entirely new field...