Why stifled Pogba is failing to deliver for Mourinho
Gabriele Marcotti, European Football Correspondent
November 5 2016, 12:01am, The Times
The onus is squarely on Pogba to be United’s creative threat, which is a different role to the one that brought him success at Juventus
Times Photographer Marc Aspland
The issue
It is like owning a fancy AGA cooker and only making eggs on toast. Or buying a Ferrari for the school run. When you spend about £100 million on a footballer, you want to make sure he’s performing. Unfortunately for Paul Pogba and Manchester United, things are not going to plan. Here is why.
No 10 role stifles him
In recent games, José Mourinho has played him farther up the pitch, behind the centre forward. Both Antonio Conte and Massimiliano Allegri, at Juventus, felt this was problematic, since it means that he often receives the ball in traffic. He can create space in these conditions, but it often requires multiple touches before he can get off a shot or a pass and by that point, defenders tend to regroup. It’s probably not a coincidence that while his shots per 90 minutes are comparable with his final season at Juventus (3.44 at United, compared with 3.7 last year), his shots on target are down some 40 per cent. And, of course, his goals are way down too (from 0.24 to 0.11).
The best position
Allegri and Conte saw Pogba as a box-to-box player. As a result, Juventus played him on one side of a midfield three (usually in the old inside left position, as can be seen from his touchmap against Palermo last season). This gave him licence to get forward and wreak havoc.
The threat of a sprinting Pogba bearing down on the opposing penalty area would often force opposing defences to react, opening up opportunities for assists. And, indeed, he averaged 0.36 per 90 minutes in 2015-16, whereas he has yet to record his first assist in the Premier League.
He had licence to attack in part because for most of his tenure Juventus played a back three, meaning there was always a spare man behind him to cover.
And on the occasions they played a diamond midfield, he had a busy, hard-tackling player like Arturo Vidal at the tip, ready to press if Juve lost the ball.
Onus on creativity
At Juventus, he was never the main creative threat for the Italian giants. In the first three years of his tenure, that responsibility lay with Italy’s Andrea Pirlo and in his last season Paulo Dybala, the Argentina midfielder, was further up the pitch.
This freed him to follow his instinct and find space. When United have the ball now, the onus is squarely on him.
Most notably, at Juventus he always had at least one and often two mobile, high-energy strikers ahead of him: Argentina’s Carlos Tévez and then Dybala and Álvaro Morata, of Spain.
They excelled at being the first line of defence, at dragging defenders out of position with their movement and, crucially, at running in behind to latch on to his through balls.
At United, he has Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who has an entirely different skill set and generally does none of those things.
Playing deep doesn’t work
At United early on, he played in a two in front of the back four, as he did in the latter stage of the European Championship finals. Indeed, early in his career, he was compared to Patrick Vieira.
The problem is that Vieira did his best work alongside a holding midfielder such as Emmanuel Petit. At United he was not paired with a defensive specialist (Marouane Fellaini or Ander Herrera). And that meant doing defensive grunt work, with limited opportunities to get forward.
Allegri tried Pogba as an understudy to Pirlo in the deep-lying playmaker role. That did not work out. It was felt that he lacked the decision-making required in the role, he took too many touches and his range of passing was not equal to Pirlo’s.
Minutes per goal
- This season: 810
- Last season: 377
New team, new boss
Pogba played four seasons at Juventus, two under Conte and two under Allegri. Much of the team — and, crucially, much of the midfield — was unchanged throughout those four seasons. At Manchester United, he has been thrown into a team who are on their third manager in four years. There are only a few guaranteed regulars. At Juventus, there was a core of five players — Claudio Marchisio, Gianluigi Buffon, Giorgio Chiellini, Andrea Barzagli and Leonardo Bonucci — with some 47 years and more than 1,750 appearances for the club between them. At United there is no longstanding group of veterans to lead on the pitch. Throw in the weight of his price tag and there is nowhere for Pogba to hide.
Sunday match previews
Solutions
If you ally his first nine games at United with his last nine at Juventus, many of his metrics are comparable, if not better. He is getting more of the ball, he is winning more duels and he is actually creating more chances (2.00 compared with 1.61). But he is not having the impact many expected.
Switching to a 3-5-2 and replicating the set-up he had at Juventus may be tempting, but it is fraught with other problems. United do not have the requisite depth at centre back and they would be playing one fewer central midfielder, despite being overloaded in that position. Adopting the system that Allegri used during Juventus’s run to the Champions League final last year, a four-man defence with a diamond, might make sense. It would mean playing a quick, mobile striker such as Marcus Rashford or Anthony Martial alongside Ibrahimovic.
That would free Ibrahimovic to drop and create chances for runners from midfield. Pogba could be on one side of the diamond, with Herrera or Jesse Lingard on the other. Juan Mata or Henrikh Mkhitaryan could slot in the hole. You would need a tactically intelligent defensive midfielder and here options are imperfect.
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