Monaco Want Pogba Gone By 1 September, And They Decided Long Before Tuesday's Injury
Nice-Matin says the Ligue 1 club told him weeks ago. A left thigh problem in training on Tuesday only closed the file. Six appearances, under two hours of football, and a settlement to negotiate.
Paul Pogba's attempt at a second career is being closed down by negotiation rather than by a manager's team sheet. Complete Sports reported on 11 August, citing the French regional daily Nice-Matin, that AS Monaco are set to terminate the contract of the former Manchester United and Juventus midfielder, that the club had already told him weeks earlier what they intended to do, and that the two sides will now work out a financial settlement covering the wages he is still owed.
The trigger was a training injury. TSN, working from Le Parisien, reported that Pogba picked up a leg problem in a session on Tuesday and left it early. Dawan, which covers African and international sport, reported that the injury was to the left thigh, that the severity was still being assessed, and that Monaco are chasing a mutual agreement rather than a unilateral sacking, with both camps wanting the file closed before 1 September. The Peoples Person, citing the transfer reporter Fabrizio Romano, quoted him as saying the "Club want to mutually terminate his deal by September 1st to let Paul find new club this year."
It is worth being precise about where this stands. Goal reported that the termination is expected rather than done, and that Pogba was booked for an MRI scan to establish how bad the thigh is. Football Italia, drawing on L'Equipe, Le Parisien and Nice-Matin, went further and treated him as a free agent again at 33, with no clarity on whether he wants to carry on playing at all. The gap between those two framings is the gap between a decision taken and a document signed.
The numbers, and why they vary
The statistics are the entire case for the prosecution, and they are close enough across outlets that the small differences do not matter. Complete Sports reported six competitive appearances and 105 minutes across his debut season. Football Italia put the same six appearances at 115 minutes. TSN, following Le Parisien, counted six Ligue 1 outings and 119 minutes. Take the most generous of the three and you still have a man who played less than two full matches in a year at the club.
TSN added the number that reframes everything: since his 2022 return to Juventus from Manchester United, Pogba has managed only 284 minutes of league football.
Monaco signed him on a free on 28 June 2025, according to Dawan, on a two-year deal running to 2027. Goal reported his wage as below £44,000 a week, modest by the standards of a player who cost £89.3 million in 2016, a fee TSN recalled alongside his 91 France caps between 2013 and 2022. His competitive debut did not arrive until November 2025, when Dawan reported he came off the bench in a 4-1 defeat at Rennes, his first match in more than two years.
Pre-season was meant to settle the question. Goal reported that he played 45 minutes in a friendly against Saint-Priest on 18 July, and Dawan reported that a right knee problem then cost him four friendlies before he rejoined group training and broke down again.
Monaco said the quiet part in January
What makes the August news less of a bombshell than the headlines suggest is that the club had already said it out loud, seven months earlier. Fox News reported Monaco general manager Thiago Scuro's press conference remarks of 14 January 2026, at which point Pogba had played three league matches for 30 minutes. "Clearly, the programme for Paul is not working as we expected in the beginning," Scuro said, per that report. He added: "A few small injuries in different parts of the body are bringing challenges to the process," and, on the club's position, "The relationship is honest. We have to keep running with the plan, even though the plan has become longer."
By this month, the language had hardened. Goal quoted Scuro saying: "The truth is that the project did not work well last season. Is he likely to leave? Yes, of course."
The player was somewhere else entirely
Against that, Pogba's own reading of his situation was strikingly different. Get French Football News reported his words in the mixed zone on 11 April 2026, after Monaco lost 4-1 to Paris FC: "I am still here. From what I've heard, we're together for the long run."
Complete Sports flagged a second, stranger detail. Over the summer, the outlet reported, the midfielder took to social media to signal he was staying for the new campaign, and he did that at a stage when nobody at the club had yet raised his future with him. Set that beside Nice-Matin's account, that Monaco had already told him weeks ago they wanted out, and one of the two timelines has to give.
The suspension that sits underneath all of it
None of this is separable from the doping case. Pogba tested positive for DHEA after Juventus' opening fixture of the 2023-24 season and was banned for four years. As Sky Sports and Al Jazeera reported, the Court of Arbitration for Sport cut that to 18 months in October 2024, backdated to 11 September 2023, clearing him to play from March 2025. Goal's explainer on the ruling reported that the panel accepted the ingestion was not intentional and traced it to a supplement prescribed by a doctor in Florida who claimed to work with high-level athletes.
He and Juventus then parted by mutual consent, and he arrived at Monaco the following summer with roughly two and a half years of competitive rust.
The other court case
There was also the extortion trial. France 24 and ESPN reported that in December 2024 a Paris court sentenced his brother Mathias Pogba to three years, two of them suspended, over a plot to extort 13 million euros from him, with the remaining year to be served on an electronic bracelet and a 20,000 euro fine. Five co-defendants received terms of up to eight years and fines of between 20,000 and 40,000 euros. Mathias' lawyer Mbeko Tabula called the ruling "extremely harsh" and said he would appeal.
What a settlement actually buys
For Monaco, the damage is contained. He arrived free, so there is no transfer fee to write off, only wages paid and whatever is agreed to release the final year. That is why 1 September matters so much to both sides: released before the European window shuts, he can still sign somewhere; released after it, he waits for January or looks outside Europe. Goal reported that MLS clubs have already been offered his services.
For Pogba, the maths is colder. He is 33, he has been interrupted every single time he has tried to build fitness since November, and Football Italia's open question, whether he wants to keep going at all, is not a rhetorical device. It is the only question left.
Monaco are not a sentimental club. They are a selling club with a trading model, the place where young players are bought, developed and moved on at a profit. So the question worth asking this week is not what happened to Paul Pogba. It is what a club like that thought it was buying.
The terms tell you. He came free, on a two-year deal, on wages Goal reported as under £44,000 a week. For a club of Monaco's means, that is not a salary, it is a stake in a bet. If the man who was central to France's 2018 World Cup win recovered anything close to his old level, they had a bargain and a shirt-selling name. If he did not, they had written off small money and a squad slot.
The bet lost. That is football, and nobody should pretend a free transfer with an upside like that was irrational.
What is harder to defend is the seven months that followed the moment it was clearly lost. Thiago Scuro stood in front of reporters on 14 January and said, in Fox News' account of the press conference, that the programme for Pogba was not working as the club expected at the beginning, and that small injuries in different parts of the body were making the process harder. Three matches. Thirty minutes. That was the club's own diagnosis in the middle of the season.
Monaco then carried him through the rest of the campaign, into a pre-season, into 45 minutes against Saint-Priest, into a knee problem, into a thigh. Only now, with a settlement to negotiate and a 1 September deadline, does the thing get closed.
The charitable reading is that they were honouring a medical process. The commercial reading is that they liked having his name on the teamsheet more than they were willing to admit. Either way, the lesson for any club chasing a marquee comeback is the one Monaco learned slowly: decide early, and act on your own assessment when you make it, not eight months later.
There is a tidy version of this story in which Monaco misjudged a signing and cut their losses. It is tidy and it is beside the point. Paul Pogba's top-level career was not ended in a boardroom in the Principality. It was ended in a consulting room in Florida.
Go back to the facts of the case. He tested positive for DHEA after Juventus' opening match of the 2023-24 season and was banned for four years. The Court of Arbitration for Sport cut it to 18 months in October 2024, as Sky Sports and Al Jazeera reported. Crucially, Goal's explainer on the ruling reported that the panel accepted the ingestion was not intentional and came from a supplement prescribed by a doctor in Florida who claimed to work with high-level athletes.
Read that again. The tribunal believed him. He served the ban anyway, because anti-doping runs on strict liability: whatever is in your body is your responsibility, no matter who handed it to you or what credentials they waved.
Two and a half years of a professional athlete's prime went into that principle. Everything since, the six appearances, the calf, the knee, the thigh on Tuesday, is a body trying to do at 33 what it stopped being trained to do at 30.
Now bring it home. Think about how Nigerian athletes actually manage their bodies. Supplements bought on a training partner's recommendation. Injections from a clinic somebody's uncle vouched for. Recovery drips advertised on Instagram by people with no medical registration anyone can check. Imported tubs with ingredient lists nobody reads and no laboratory here can verify.
Our federations still treat anti-doping as a form to be completed before a major championship. It is a daily duty of care: an approved-products list, a named medical officer at camp, a written record of every prescription an athlete is given, and education that starts in the youth teams.
Pogba had Juventus money, Juventus lawyers and a CAS hearing, and the rule still took his career. A Nigerian athlete in the same position gets the ban, and no hearing anybody writes about.
