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On Thursday, the National Anti-Doping Tribunal (TNA) sentenced Paul Pogba, a player for Juventus and the French national team, to a 4-year ban from football. The notice of the disqualification was notified on Thursday morning to Juventus, with whom Pogba is currently under contract.
Pogba, who will turn 31 in March, last August tested positive for testosterone, one of the substances prohibited for athletes by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), after a test at the end of the Udinese-Juventus match on the first day of the football championship of Serie A in progress. Pogba didn’t play in that match. Testosterone positivity was confirmed in October by the results of the so-called “counter-analysis” (i.e. analyzes carried out on a second urine sample, taken on the same occasion to verify positivity).
Pogba he said who will appeal the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), an independent international body based in Lausanne which examines various sporting disputes. If it were to be confirmed, the sentence would have major consequences on Pogba’s career: at the end of the disqualification period he would in fact be 35 years old, a rather advanced age for a professional footballer and in which many are close to retiring or have already retired.
At the start of the season, Pogba had been used for just over 50 minutes in two league matches in the first round, against Empoli and Bologna, when his testosterone test had not been confirmed (in Udine, in the match of doping control, he had not played). He returned to Juventus in the summer of 2022, but missed the entire 2022/2023 season – including the World Cup in Qatar with France – due to physical problems that continued into the current championship.
Pogba began his professional career in 2009 in England, when Manchester United bought him on a free transfer from Le Havre, a French team. He played at United for three years: he made his first team debut in September 2011, during a Carabao Cup match against Leeds. In the summer of the following year Giuseppe Marotta, the then Juventus sporting director, signed him on a free transfer (i.e. without paying the cost of his contract at Manchester, signing him once the previous contract had concluded).
In the three seasons in which he played in Serie A, Pogba was one of the strongest midfielders in the championship: with Juventus he won three consecutive league titles and also played in the 2015 Champions League final, which however was won by Barcelona.
In 2016 he was bought back by Manchester United for 105 million euros, the most expensive transfer in football history up to that point. In the 2017/2018 season he managed to reach second place in the Premier League table, the best result achieved by the club in recent times. The year before he had also won the Europa League, beating the Dutch team Ajax 2 to 0 in the final. In 2018 he won the World Cup in Russia with the French national team, the most prestigious result of his career.
In 2022 Pogba signed a 4-year contract with Juventus, with an annual net salary of around 4 million euros. However, in October Juventus had reduced his compensation to the minimum required by the federal regulation (just over 40 thousand euros per year), a possibility foreseen by the anti-doping rules. At the moment it is unclear what Juventus will want to do after this latest development.