Former Manchester United captain Gary Neville believes that Paul Pogba will eventually regress back to the player that he was when he first moved to Manchester.
Pogba has scored eights goals and provided five assists in nine Premier League games under new manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer but Neville believes that his form could eventually regress back to the player that first came to Old Trafford for £89.3 million from Juventus.
“To be balanced on Pogba, for two years, £95 million, he gave the club nowhere near enough in terms of performance levels and his contribution,” Neville said on Sky Sports.
“In the last two or three months he’s playing like the player – to be fair – that they bought for £95 million, and he’s an outstanding player when he plays like he is doing at the moment, but his agent and his character, in my opinion…. if he plays for Manchester United like he has for the next five years at the levels that he’s playing at now, there will be no one happier than us two watching him out there…. because he’s absolutely outstanding…. but in the back of my mind the problems that we were witnessing in the first two years will emanate again at some point.
"His agent will be into him and he'll be wanting his move away and his pay off." 💰@GNev2 says Pogba is currently playing like the player @ManUtd thought they signed, but worries about the impact of the player's agent and his commitment. 👀
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“I think that his agent will be into him and he’ll want his next move away, he’ll want his next pay off and that’s my problem with it and that’s the issue I have with it. His commitment to the club has got to be long term and it has got to be at the level that Manchester United paid £95 million for him.
“He’s been brilliant, he’s been outstanding, and to be fair he could tear Liverpool apart on his own today if he makes those runs into the box, and he’s been outstanding, but this is only three months of football in the two-and-a-half years from the three seasons so let’s keep it in balance.
“If he’s playing like this in two years all of us will be sat here saying wonderful, fantastic things. My personal view is that his agent will be into him in the next transfer window, or two or three, and saying ‘come on we need to get over there now, we need to get over to there’.
“That’s my worry with him; can he be trusted in the long term?”
Fellow Sky Sports pundit Graeme Souness has been one of Pogba’s harshest critics and he doubled down on his critiques and added that he never got a kick of the ball during United’s recent Champions League tie with Champions League.
“The stats show that United are running more than they were previously, putting in the hard yards for the new manager in terms of closing down and sprinting back, all the stuff that they weren’t doing for Mourinho. I was critical of Paul Pogba, in particular, but was I wrong?
“Look at the difference in him between then and now, and let’s not get carried away either: he never got a kick against PSG, then showed his frustration by lunging at Dani Alves and being sent off.”
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