Paul Pogba epitomises everything there is about the new modern football
With his positive social media branding, friendliness with opposition and inflated transfer fees, Paul Pogba is the face of the new modern football.
When it was breaking that Romelu Lukaku was on the cusp of joining Manchester United, defying initial rumours that a return to Chelsea was in the works, it was of little surprise that Paul Pogba was rearing his head in the social media reels.
The two had been training and enjoying each other’s company in Los Angeles, a new phenomenon amongst modern sports stars that regardless of team or allegiance or even sport, there is a general acceptance that they can hang out and be friendly during their downtime. Look across to American sport — which has seen the rise of a shared social media culture among athletes that has swept into Europe and beyond — and its not unusual to see rival players training with each during the off-season, going on holidays together or joining in a friendly game of Madden.
In football, English football in particular, this is an altogether more unusual thought that players not with the same club or nationality should be seen mingling. Cast your mind back ten to fifteen years, during the time when should you dare glance across the tunnel at an opposing player you’d get a swift slap to the ear by a Roy Keane, a Patrick Vieira or a Steven Gerrard.
Nowadays, the tunnel situation is more akin to a Friday night get-together with the lads rather than a pipeline of intensity ahead of battle on the pitch. Everyone is pals with everyone, there’s outrageous handshakes, hugs, brief chats about the family and life and banter. The premise that football was your club, and your loyalty split an imaginary line between you and your enemy for the day is long gone. Social media, the influx of various nationalities into the mix, has diluted the pre-match battleground into a social get-together.
It’s a wonder the smart phone isn’t out, with live Instagram feeds of the co-mingling amongst opposition. Maybe next season we’ll get the first tunnel selfie, with Pogba welcoming his comrade Alexandre Lacazette to the Premier League under a seflie stick. Vieira and Keane would turn in their graves.
When the Frenchman was about to wet ink on the most expensive transfer of all time, his crew at Adidas produced a video which teed up his move to Adidas-designed Manchester United. It was perfect for Adidas, which now had its most brandable face linked with the United juggernaut. This type of transfer introduction video has now paved a way for clubs to unveil their new signings in new and unique ways; such as Mohamd Salah scrolling through a Twitter feed of Liverpool fans begging the club to “announce Salah”, and Wayne Rooney being welcomed back to a gushing video that involved cameos from kitmen and Duncan Ferguson. It’s sad that even Big Dunc, one of the lasting old school characters in the English game, can get roped into the cringiness.
The media and thirst for transfer speculation and confirmation has removed any impact these types of videos may have. They are merely an advertising campaign, trying to sell likes and retweets and attention. Our football clubs have turned into entertainment shows, a PR-building attention seeker, rather than a sports organisation at core with its mostly working class die-hards.
Even the inflation of transfer fees, where a relegated English goalkeeper can be priced at £30million and a player like Bernardo Silva be valued at €70million, a mere €10million less than what his fellow Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo cost Real Madrid eight years ago, could be attributed to Paul Pogba.
Soon, we may be blaming the contentment with average performances in respect to huge transfer fees on the Frenchman too.
This isn’t an attack on Pogba. His performance for United is inevitably going to get better as he matures and a stronger squad is structured around him. He’s football’s first super-athlete, a social media phenomenon that crosses sport and culture in a way that performances on the field could never do. He’s paving a path where players and teams will become ever more reliant on social media, and a friendly, happy-go-lucky image that tears down rivalries and dilutes clashes on the field because everyone follows each other on Instagram.
This summer’s transfer activity, with Pogba basically tapping up his friend Lukaku in joining him at Old Trafford, is just the beginning. Soon it’ll become a regular occurrence between friends and comrades, in a much more brazen fashion than a sly text or a brief word during international training.
Paul Pogba epitomises everything there is about the new era of modern football, an era which may begin to dilute the product on the pitch more so than the product in the studios and in the stands.
