Monaco tear up Pogba’s contract four days before their first match of the season

Monaco announced on Wednesday that Paul Pogba is no longer their player. The contract had until the summer of 2027 to run and has been torn up by mutual agreement, four days before the club open the Ligue 1 season at Le Havre.

The statement on the club’s website is unusually blunt for a goodbye. Both sides, it says, felt the objectives set when Pogba arrived had only been partially achieved.

One season, six appearances

Pogba joined in June 2025 on a free transfer, out of contract and out of the game, with a two-year deal that was supposed to carry him back to the top. He did not play a competitive minute until 22 November, when he came on in the 85th minute at Rennes in a 4-1 defeat. That was 811 days after his previous appearance, a substitute outing in Juventus’s 2-0 win at Empoli on 3 September 2023, and it was the first time he had played in Ligue 1 at all.

Six appearances followed, only one of them a start, and the whole season added up to less than two hours of football. A knee problem cost him weeks, and a thigh injury this month took away whatever chance he had of starting the new campaign in the squad.

Nice-Matin reported before the announcement that Monaco had told Pogba some time ago they wanted the arrangement to end, and that the club expected to settle the remaining wages. He had suggested on social media earlier in the summer that he was staying, which reads differently now.

The ban that took two years

The gap in his career came from a positive test for DHEA after Juventus played Udinese in August 2023. Italy’s anti-doping tribunal suspended him provisionally that September and banned him for four years in February 2024. The Court of Arbitration for Sport cut that to 18 months in October 2024, accepting that he had taken a supplement prescribed by a doctor in Florida rather than doped deliberately, and he became eligible to play again in March 2025.

By then he had not played in a year and a half, and he had already terminated his Juventus contract, in November 2024. Monaco were the club willing to find out what was left. The honest answer, after a season, is that nobody found out.

What both sides said

Chief executive Thiago Scuro called the signing an ambitious challenge and admitted the ending was not the one the club wanted. He pointed to what Pogba gave the dressing room, particularly to the younger players, and to the fact that a man who had been out of football for two years got back on a pitch at all.

Pogba thanked the president, the management, his team-mates and the staff. “AS Monaco is an incredible club and although I did not play as many games as I had hoped, I will always be grateful for the opportunity to wear their colours,” he said.

He is 33, a World Cup winner from 2018, and a free agent with no club named. Monaco, meanwhile, start their season at Le Havre on Sunday, 8:45pm IST, with a midfield that will not include him.

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