OFFICIALLY OFFICIAL: Juventus, Paul Pogba agree to contract termination

Today at 02:50 PM

We've now reached the end of the road.

Nearly 2 ¹⁄₂ years after Paul Pobga flashed his big smile as he stepped out of a Jeep at J Medical to officially mark his return to Juventus, the now-31-year-old French midfielder has departed the club in a very different kind of fashion.

Not with a bang.

Basically, the exact opposite of that.

In an extremely brief club statement posted to the Juventus website late Friday night, it was announced that the rumblings we've heard earlier in the day are most certainly now being put into motion. Juventus have officially bid farewell to Pogba, with the former No. 10 seeing his contract that previously run through 2026 now set to end at the end of November. It's a quiet end to a return to Turin that many hoped would see Pogba potentially return to his big heights as a player, but instead constant injuries in his first season before a doping ban that happened just a few weeks into the 2023-24 campaign derailing all of those hopes that he could potentially get back to his best.

While Pogba had seen his doping suspension reduced from four years to 18 months after a successful appear to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, reports out of Italy after that news came out immediately suggested that likelihood of Pogba staying at Juventus were quite slim.

And, just as we thought, that's exactly what it was.

Said statement is as follows:

Juventus Football Club and Paul Pogba announce that they have reached a mutual agreement for the termination of their contract as of 30 November, 2024.

The club wishes Paul the very best for his professional future.

That's it. That's the statement. Two sentences announcing that Pogba will no longer be a Juventus player. It's understandably a lot different than what we saw the club roll out when Pogba marked his return to the club in the summer of 2022 when the vibes were a whole lot different. There was excitement. There was optimism that the midfield finally had a big-time upgrade from a player we already knew so well and launched into stardom before he headed back to Manchester in 2016.

According to reports earlier in the day Friday, Juventus will save around €30 million gross when it comes to remaining salary figures that were left on Pogba's deal.

Pogba, once one of the highest paid players in Serie A, had been on a minimum salary ever since his provisional suspension was announced in September 2023.

Even if it's a predictable ending to Pogba 2.0 at Juventus, it's also a very sad one. We knew of the injury concerns coming in, and those turned out to even surpass the worries that many had no matter how good of a player Pogba is when healthy. The problem with his first season back is that he was barely healthy at all. And when he was healthy — albeit for an extremely short period of time — it's not like he could log a ton of minutes to begin with. Then came the failed doping test that he took after the season opener against Udinese 15 months ago and everything that came along with that.

The end game after whatever happened with the appeals process was going to be something like this. Juventus have clearly moved on and wanted to do so once the legal proceedings were done. It didn't matter what Pogba said during his media blitz in the aftermath of his suspension being reduced and thus allowing him to return to the field come March 2025, Juve had one clear goal here and that was to end Pogba's contract with as little fuss as possible.

And now they've done just that, with Pogba free to play wherever he wants come the new year.

Many had visions of Pogba returning and taking Juventus up a level considering the dearth of players like him in the midfield ever since he left six years earlier. Instead, his second tenure in Turin involved just 12 appearances and many more off-field headlines than Juventus could have even imagined.