Reportedly, Barcelona were recently in talks with Paul Pogba’s agent, Mino Raiola for a potential transfer of the French midfielder from Manchester United as Raiola offered Pogba to the Spanish giants. The La Liga champions had previously chased down the 25-year-old’s signature but Pogba chose to remain with Juventus and later signed with the Red Devils in the summer of 2016 for a club record-breaking transfer.
Now, it is widely known that he is unhappy at Old Trafford under the Jose Mourinho management. The influential Frenchman has struggled to meet expectations since his prodigious return to Manchester and was even dropped to the benches for academy youngster, Scott McTominay in the middle of the 2017/18 season.
Pogba’s attacking talents somehow does not gel with the defensive setup Mourinho likes to implement with his team. The Frenchman enjoys surging ahead to be more involved on the offensive end but in the process, forgets to maintain his positional discipline as commanded by his Portuguese head coach.
This has led to speculations over Pogba’s future in the Red Devils squad as the team finished 19 points behind Manchester City last season. United also lost out to Chelsea in the FA Cup finals, thus ending their second campaign under Jose Mourinho without any silverware. The former Galactico boss has already brought in Fred from Shakhtar Donetsk this summer along with signing Marouane Fellaini to a new contract. He has also been noted to be pursuing Lazio’s highly rated Serbian midfielder, Sergej Milinković-Savić and Paris Saint-Germain’s Adrien Rabiot.
Despite having the likes of Nemanja Matic, Ander Herrera, McTominay, Juan Mata, Fred and Pogba in midfield, the 55-year-old United boss is clearly looking to make further additions ahead of the 2018/19 campaign. Does this prove the fact that Pogba’s future at Old Trafford is set to be over after the completion of the 2018 FIFA World Cup? Barcelona are drawing links with a number of world-class players after the departure of Andres Iniesta from Camp Nou and Pogba is reportedly one of them.
The Blaugrana have yet again missed out on the UEFA Champions League after losing to AS Roma in the quarterfinal stage. Instead, they observed their bitter rivals, Real Madrid win it three times in a row. With Neymar also departing last summer, Valverde could use some additional heads to put forth a better challenge for the continental cup next season. Paulinho has returned to China and their most expensive duo, Philippe Coutinho and Ousmane Dembele are yet to really hit the ground running at Camp Nou.
Maybe Pogba could fill in the position of Iniesta and United will be able to reinvest their transfer gain for a more suitable replacement.
