Up close, flush with the playing field, it’s like a rebus. Five letters, P, O, G, B, A, and a number, 6, displayed on a kind of blue cloud of France 2018, the color of the football world champions. Seen from above, everything becomes clearer: the cloud is a representation of the back of Paul Pogba, and the gray and gold crescent drawn above a stylized tribute to the always very studied hairstyles of the player.
This “Terrain of Possibilities”, so named and designed by the football star and his equipment supplier in 2021, is his legacy to Roissy-en-Brie (Seine-et-Marne), a city of 23,000 inhabitants which he left at the age of 13 to join Le Havre and its training center. This mini-pitch used for five-on-five matches is his ” honor ” and his ” dream “he says in The Pogmentarythe awkward documentary dedicated to his journey, and broadcast on Amazon Prime.
According to this pillar of the Blues – 91 selections on the clock – Roissy-en-Brie is “the source, the family”. At 29, he hardly returns to it, but this tiny dot on the map remains a capital landmark for those who have been navigating for years in the great world of football, from Manchester United to Juventus Turin, and in the high places of the jet-set, from Dubai to Miami. A sensitive point too, even “a dangerous place”he recalls in The Pogmentarythe frame of a past that has just been brutally remembered.
First in March, in the form of a nightmarish evening with old “friends” from Roissy-en-Brie. Then at the end of August, when the case came to light, with the dissemination on social networks of two videos full of resentment, a jumble of accusations and threats thrown to the ground by his own older brother Mathias. For nearly three months, investigators from the Central Office for the Fight against Organized Crime (OCLCO) are trying to untangle the threads of this multi-layered soap opera, where we meet cumbersome friends, hooded men armed with assault rifles, and even a marabout.
On the two videos, released on August 27 and 30, Mathias Pogba, 32, reports potentially embarrassing revelations for his famous brother, “a person ready to step on everything and everyone, on his family, for his pleasure, his image and his success”. He evokes supposed “spells” cast, on the initiative of this same Paul Pogba, against one of his teammates with the Blues, Kylian Mbappé, and alludes to broken promises and above all to a debt that Paul Pogba, always him, would have contracted towards mysterious creditors. Soon, a scenario worthy of a gangster movie takes shape in the background of this story of debt: men claim to have protected the star since his professional debut and claim 1 million a year from him. Thirteen years of career, 13 million euros, such is their price. They have been insistently reminding him of this since March.
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