Report: Paul Pogba unlikely to be 100% healthy for Juve’s season opener

While there was no friendly Saturday night at Levi’s Stadium, Juventus players and coaches still took to the field in Santa Clara, California, to get some sort of training session in. While pretty much everybody we know to be healthy took part in the training session, there was one very notable player who was limited to side work.

Something that has come more and more common over the last 12 months.

Paul Pogba was not a participant in Juve’s training session at Levi’s before the squad flew to Los Angeles and set up their main base camp for the U.S. tour. As Sky Italia’s Gianluca Di Marzio outlines, there is a very good reason for that — the oft-injured French midfielder is still very much playing a game of catch-up when it comes to his fitness levels and recovery from his injury problems of a season ago. That means it is unlikely that Pogba will see the field during either of Juve’s remaining two friendlies in the U.S. against Milan and Real Madrid.

The fitness issues have reached a point where Pogba is, even at this point in time, not looking likely to be fit enough to take part in Juve’s season-opening trip to Udine, Di Marzio reports.

At this point, it’s hard to really doubt anything that comes out about Pogba’s health simply because the past 12 months since he came back to Juventus have been pretty much an entire wash. Ever since he suffered a knee injury in training immediately after the first game of the U.S. tour last summer, things have been just a complete mess health-wise. That comes after Pogba’s final couple of seasons with Manchester United were just as much of a mess when it came to his match fitness.

And now, at the age of 30, things aren’t getting better.

In fact, it’s just a complete mystery just how much Juve will get from him.

As Di Marzio writers, “(Pogba’s) return to the field is still unknown.” That is something that you don’t want to read — or say, or hear — regarding one of your highest-paid players who is coming off a 2022-23 season in which they appeared in just a handful of games and started all of one of them before getting injured again and missing the rest of the campaign because of it.

We don’t know what the future will hold for Pogba, but the fact that we’re back again dealing with injury and fitness worries before the season has even started is not a good sign about what could be in store a few months down the road. You want to be optimistic, but it’s hard to do so when these things keep happening and it’s just another issue in what has been a 12-month period full of them since he re-signed with Juventus.