Reports: Juve still want to terminate Paul Pogba's contract despite reduced ban

Today at 04:15 AM

PogBack could be ending when the springtime arrives.

With Friday's news that Paul Pogba is much closer to returning to the field as compared to any point since his four-year doping ban was handed down, there have been a lot of scenarios thrown out there as to where he might fit into Juventus plans. Potential lineups being drawn, moving of the pieces of where the Frenchman could fit into Thiago Motta's squad, a whole lot of speculation just about everywhere you look.

However, whether Pogba is actually in Juventus' plans as we sit a few months from his potential return to training still remains to be seen.

The initial indication is that Juventus trying to termination Pogba's contract once he's eligible to return is still much more likely than him wearing bianconero come March, according to reports late Friday from TuttoJuve's Mirko Di Natale and Italian transfer report Nico Schira. While Pogba's shortened doping suspension from four years to 18 months hasn't been officially communicated just yet, Juventus' stance regarding Pogba's future at the club remains along same lines as it has despite the club saying that they will wait for the entire appeals process to play out before making a final decision.

The decision, though, is reportedly that Pogba isn't part of the project and that they will work to find a solution to terminate his contract, one that runs through 2026.

In a subsequent post to X, formerly known as Twitter, Schira reported that Pogba's camp is already working to find a potential destination on the transfer market, with Major League Soccer clubs having already asked for info on the 31-year-old midfielder. The Saudi Pro League has also been thrown out as a potential destination for Pogba in the past.

Pogba's future has suddenly come to the forefront once again thanks to the report from the Daily Mail on Friday regarding his appeal of his original four-year doping ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland. The CAS ruling, according to the Daily Mail, stated that the ruling on Pogba's appeal "confirmed that Pogba did inadvertently take DHEA, a substance that boosts testosterone that is on WADA's banned list. Crucially, however, the ruling states that DHEA only has an affect on females."

Pogba is now eligible to return to training with Juventus in January, with his first chance to play in a competitive game again coming in March. But, with these reports, the likelihood of that actually happening at Juventus might not be as high as originally thought.

Considering the fact that he hasn't played or even trained with the Juventus squad for over a year now, it's hard to truly gauge how quickly he could even get up to speed before the end of the 2024-25 season. And knowing that he hasn't played for so long and his lengthy injury history even before his doping ban was handed down, it's hard to know just what kind of state his overall fitness level is in.

Terminating Pogba's contract would allow Juve to fully turn the page on the Pogba 2.0 era while also saving them some money even with him being on a minimum salary since the original provisional suspension was handed out in September 2023.