United Exercise Additional One-Year Option on Pogba

As featured yesterday in this column (see; Pogba Circus Continues), the Paul Pogba/Manchester United saga has taken a new twist with United moving to tie the French midfielder to the club until 2022.

This puts to bed (for a spell anyhow) speculation linking the player to a move to Barcelona. The Catalan giant had become ‘flavour of the month’ for linkage to Pogba, but predictably both Real Madrid and PSG featured heavily in speculation too, not least when Pogba declared it would be a dream to play for Real during a press conference while on French national team duty last week.

Per BBC Sport it is understood United’s decision to exercise the additional one-year option on Pogba’s contract was taken a couple of weeks ago, so it may well not be reactionary to any events that occurred over the past seven days.

Pogba rejoined United from Juventus for a club record £89m in 2016 and has started all three league games for United this season, including the 1-6 thrashing by Tottenham Hotspur at Old Trafford.