Pogba Has No Excuses with Stage Set for Huge 2nd Season at United

Pre-eminent American designer Charles Eames used to swear by the maxim: "Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose."

With a designer's eye for detail, Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho, throughout his career, has proved to be a specialist at arranging elements with the purpose of creating football teams in his own image.

Against accusations of egotism, Mourinho might proffer the Gore Vidal view a narcissist is simply anyone better looking than you are.

It is a measure, then, of the regard he holds Paul Pogba that it seems a little different at Manchester United. Rather than straitjacketing the Frenchman's heady talent to work within a framework of his design—witness Eden Hazard's tracking back at Chelsea, looking as natural as a surfer in a suit—Mourinho has spent the summer titivating his side so it better suits Pogba.

As a concession, it's a little like Alfred Hitchcock changing a film's narrative arc to make James Stewart or Cary Grant look even more dashing. Mourinho is happy to work with big-name casts, demands it even, but overseeing a star vehicle has never previously appealed to him.

Off stage left, Anthony Martial and Henrikh Mkhitaryan quietly ponder whether a surfeit of managerial love owes itself to being overindulged elsewhere.

Inescapable is the sense Mourinho feels the best way to continue his remarkable record of winning the domestic title in his second season at each of his clubs is to get the best out of Pogba. At FC Porto, Chelsea (twice), Real Madrid and Inter Milan, it was a case of second time lucky. He will be acutely aware he has never previously had to make the leap from sixth to first.

Winning two out of four trophies in a debut campaign is success enough to comfortably withstand the disappointment of a sixth-place finish, some 24 points behind champions Chelsea. Mourinho is cute enough to know while his side has guts, it has no personality. Or goals, for that matter. Zlatan Ibrahimovic carried United on both fronts last season.

He won't be there this time around, at least not for the first six months or so, even if he signs a new deal. Having him out of the picture may just let the other big players at United breathe a little, with it not uncommon for team-mates to fade into the background when the Zlatan show is in town.

In short, Mourinho needs Pogba to stop playing at being one of the best players in the world. Hinting at it will no longer suffice. He needs to live it until it consumes him. Pogba needs to be as big a personality on the pitch as he is off it.

While the majority of Manchester United supporters seem quietly content with his contribution last season, a propensity to be over-elaborate and a decision-making process that at times recalls Nick Leeson's make him the proverbial sitting duck.

"Every player has his own personality," he once told L'Equipe (via Football Italia). "I'm a player who tries a lot. If I get something wrong, I'll try again. Maybe [Andrea] Pirlo played a little simpler, whereas I play hard from the first minute to the last."

A willingness to keep trying things when everything is going wrong for him is both endearing and infuriating. If Roy Keane were still playing, it's possible Pogba would become the first player to be retired by one of his own team-mates.

Of their time together at Juventus, former team-mate Patrice Evra said Pogba's exacting standards are often the cause of repeated errors, per La Gazzetta dello Sport: "Pogba's problem is that he has too much quality. When he makes a mistake, he gets frustrated because everyone thinks a player of his calibre can't make a mistake." Yeah. That'll be it.

There's no more divisive a player in the Premier League. The £89 million fee United paid to sign him from Juventus invariably means his performances are judged less against the other 21 players on the pitch than his price. It's a situation that simultaneously somehow seems fair enough yet completely reductive.

Twelve months on, a fee many predicted would obfuscate the market to the point of it becoming completely unrecognisable has done just that. Neymar's £200 million move from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain is no less preposterous than Swansea City's reported £50 million valuation of Gylfi Sigurdsson, per BBC Sport's Dafydd Pritchard. As one of the most commercially bankable sportspeople in the world, and still just 24, at £89 million, Pogba's signing may just prove smart business. What a world.

This obsession with price and value, at a time when Fantasy Football is starting to look more anchored than the real thing, feels like entering an art gallery and paying more attention to the price list than the pictures themselves. While the art world would probably agree it is no less preoccupied with money than football is, it doesn't make it any less depressing.

It can only be a matter of time before squad numbers, hardly a romantic introduction themselves, are scrapped in favour of numbers on the back of shirts denoting transfer fees.

Maybe it's a generational thing. Gaining an education watching VHS videos of the likes of Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Michel Platini, Pele et al. gone grainy through overuse, it never once occurred to ask the price of any of them. Now, it would probably be the first question.

This time last year, Pogba was still a Juventus player, with his most strenuous workouts post-France losing the European Championship final to Portugal being a couple of basketball sessions with Romelu Lukaku in Los Angeles. Mourinho will no doubt urge the pair to take Gareth Bale or Lionel Messi on vacation with them next summer.

Given Pogba's history and longstanding relationship with United, perhaps it was overstated just how seamless he would find his return to England. Though Pogba grew up with the club, having come through the academy, he left as a 19-year-old with less than a handful of Premier League matches to his name. He returned as the most expensive footballer in the history.

The ear-to-ear grin was unmistakably the same, but expectations shifted, perceptions become warped. In his four years away from Manchester, the gangly, goofy French kid had metamorphosized into one of the most recognizable people on the planet.

He was expected to hit the ground running last term despite having to adjust to a league very different to the one he had just left. It's safe to say time is probably the thing he misses most about Serie A.

This season, it's different. Pogba will start the new campaign on August 13 against West Ham United fitter and more focused. As will his team-mates after a tour of the U.S. infinitely better organised than last summer's farce in China, which saw one game cancelled because of the poor condition of the pitch.

After a summer break, a full and impressive pre-season behind him and the likelihood of playing in his best position in an advanced role in a 4-3-3, he must deliver. Even in the 3-5-2 formation United have trialled over the summer, Pogba would be granted licence to get further forward. There are no excuses.

Mourinho would never concede as much, but the signings of the Frenchman's close friend Lukaku and Nemanja Matic were no doubt made with the midfielder in mind. While Ibrahimovic's immaculate touch often made Pogba's long passes look like mini masterpieces, a lack of pace meant they would often end up being held up as opposed to taken on.

Few players can drop a ball over the shoulder of a defender like Pogba; even fewer can match Lukaku's pace and power when going up one-on-one. If they click, it's potentially a devastating partnership.

Matic's addition is even more important. He arrives at Old Trafford with the primary aim of freeing Pogba. He's the world's first £40 million babysitter and may just be the most important signing of the summer.

On the 1984 Smiths single "Still Ill," the bard of Stretford, Steven Patrick Morrissey, posed one of life's great philosophical questions: "Does the mind rule the body or the body rule the mind?" Though both a red and author of "Roy's Keen," it'd be fanciful to suggest he was pondering the perpetual conundrum of United's midfield at the time. Regardless, Pogba and Matic in the same team provides perfect contrasting examples of both theorems. Matic is as much a thinking footballer as Pogba is a physical one.

On song, Pogba can be intoxicating. He's a viscerally thrilling performer in the flesh. When he charges forward on the counter, it's like watching a horse that has dislodged its jockey and is galloping for the finishing line not because it is in a race but because it is the natural thing to do. Given it's not hard to imagine Mourinho as a jockey, strapping himself to the back of Luke Shaw to whip him into shape, that he is seemingly desperate to have Pogba play without blinkers is a measure of absolute, previously uncharted faith. The aesthetic atheist seems to have found religion at last.

As a father of a toddler whose feet seem to take him to places rather than the other way around, when my son sets off, there's no discernible way of knowing where he'll end up. One suspects United supporters experience a similar sensation when Pogba embarks on one of his rumbustious runs from deep. 

If Pogba is the toddler, and that isn't meant in a derogatory way, then Matic is the stair gate. After an impressive United debut against Sampdoria on Wednesday saw him provide the type of metronomic rhythm that could largely reduce Michael Carrick's captaincy this season to a speaking role (except when wheeled out as added protection against fellow big guns), Mourinho was gushing in his praise.

"He needs time, but [his] experience, intelligence, a genius in the way he thinks—he thinks football," Mourinho said, per Mark Dobson of the Guardian.

Quite the endorsement from a man who, back in October 2015, a couple of months before he was sacked by Chelsea, brought Matic on as a substitute against Southampton and replaced him just 28 minutes later. The Serb, not playing well at the time, would later tell the Mirror (h/t Vaishali Bhardwaj of the Evening Standard): "I am a man first of all and, of course, I felt bad at that moment. But as you know, I didn't react. I stayed professional."

Mourinho will have noted his reaction. An ability to compartmentalise emotions is exactly what he looks for in his players, especially those on-field lieutenants who anchor his sides. It's the position in Mourinho teams that cannot be underestimated.

From Costinha to Claude Makelele to Xabi Alonso to Esteban Cambiasso and now back to Matic, his teams have always relied on an icy heart from which everything else ticks and flows. If Mourinho were ever a player, as opposed to a translator-turned-coach, he'd have been a defensive midfielder. His ear attuned to his manager's calls just as intently as those of his team-mates.

He knows Matic will sit and watch the game play out in front of him just as intently as he does from the touchline. As important as anything he will do with the ball is what he will do without it: cajoling his team-mates into position, dropping into centre-half when required, pushing the full-backs higher up the pitch, knowing when to press and when to drop. It's the all-seeing position, and Mourinho trusts him. It's not an honour he bestows upon many.

All of which makes Chelsea's decision to sell him seem all the more mystifying. More than any other club, they know how Mourinho works. Perhaps Blues boss Antonio Conte got wind of Matic fancying a reunion with a former flame and refused to be the cuckold. After the hair jibe, it's a wonder he didn't hold out for double.

The idea Matic has been on a steady decline for the past two seasons and, at 29, represents a £40 million busted flush seems incoherently premature. Last season, he made 30 Premier League starts (with a further five substitute appearances) in central midfield for a Chelsea side that won the title with the second-highest points tally in the competition's history. When they won it under Mourinho in 2014/15, he made 35 starts.

It is the omnipresence of N'Golo Kante, brilliant as he undoubtedly is, that often leads to somewhat hysterical anatomical breakdowns of how sides he is involved with function. To his advocates, he is Chelsea's heart, lungs and brain. Matic was the appendix. A spare part with no discernible function, it was one Conte was happy to cut out once it started to grumble amid interest from United.

Pogba too is often cast in ill light when reviews come in of his and Kante's comparative performances for France.

While it's true Kante's possession of an engine that could power the national grid perhaps renders the need for twin holding midfielders obsolete—though there are probably at least 93 arguments to the contrary—it is perhaps no coincidence that it was alongside Matic he showed himself to be a far better player going forward than many had ever imagined. Rewatch clips of Kante driving forward with the ball last season, and invariably Matic is double-checking the back door has been locked to no fanfare.

It's a job he will do time and time again for Manchester United. The Serb is the type of man who comes to a dinner party and quietly fixes a dishwasher the host didn't know was broken. Though Ander Herrera proved himself a malleable sort last season in occupying the same role, he was never a true caretaker like Matic.

Nonetheless, the Spaniard earned his stripes by allowing himself to be moulded by Mourinho. An earnest student, Herrera will have been delighted when his manager retracted earlier misgivings to note how he had become the most tactically switched-on player in his squad, per Jack Austin of The Independent. The Portuguese must have thought he was watching himself out on the pitch, having made Herrera into an angry misanthrope.

With Matic at the base of his midfield, Mourinho finally has the player ideally suited to sit in a 4-3-3 formation that historically has always gotten the best out of Pogba. As both Conte and Massimiliano Allegri will attest from their time working with the player at Juventus, Pogba thrives in a three-man midfield.

Give him licence to play as an old-fashioned box-to-box player, and he's even better. Reared on Bryan Robson, there is nothing Old Trafford regulars appreciate more than a player who gleans almost as much satisfaction from a last-ditch tackle as a last-gasp goal.

It would be a surprise if United did not start the season by aping the old Juventus midfield of Andrea Pirlo, Artur Vidal and Pogba.

Matic is no Pirlo in terms of his passing but has a more expansive range than he is perhaps given credit for. Like everything he does, he passes the ball intelligently. There's an echo of Carrick in how he is confident enough to hit straight low passes in a forward direction. It's an underrated skill, risky and less straightforward than it looks.

Herrera unquestionably has the pugnacious energy and appetite for a scrap to throw himself into the Vidal role, while Pogba should be capable of playing himself with minimum fuss.

As a three, Mourinho can be confident they won't fall into the trap of fetishising possession, either. United have been accused of going long too often since Sir Alex Ferguson's retirement in 2013, but more turgid than any directness to their play has been laboriousness in possession, particularly at Old Trafford.

In Mourinho's stock 4-2-3-1 system last season, Pogba was often used as both a holding midfielder and a No. 10. Taking the ball off the toes of his centre-halves feels a waste, like having Michel Roux Jr. at your disposal to cook dinner and asking him to concoct a meal using only tinned produce.

Likewise, when he plays further forward, with less field to bomb into, his talent seems literally squeezed. Trying to unlock opposition defences with about as much inclination to leave the edge of their own area as picnic-goers who have finally commandeered a table in the sun is not his game, either.

He needs to be indulged, allowed to meander. Mourinho seems to have conceded it might be better to accentuate his positives rather than neuter his negatives. He can pass a long diagonal as well as record-breaking New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady can throw one, while one of the main lines coming out of United's tour of the U.S. is Mourinho's belief Pogba can score anywhere around 15 goals this season, as reported by Miguel Delaney of The Independent.

Last term, he managed just five in the Premier League, with nine his total in all competitions. Such numbers hardly scream he is on the cusp of adding a Frank Lampard-esque goalscoring prowess to his game. However, his record of having struck the woodwork a remarkable 10 times is testimony to how the difference between a decent campaign and an excellent one can literally be the width of a post.

Fine margins or otherwise, Pogba knows anything other than an outstanding season will fall on the deafest of ears. He can't change his fee, but there's no reason why he can't own it.