Di María and Pogba: one strange Juventus season

Two Careers That Never Should Have Crossed Again

Di María's story by 2022 was essentially finished and famous: Benfica breakthrough, a La Liga and Champions League at Real Madrid, a single difficult season at Manchester United, and then seven years as PSG's all-time top assist provider, a treble-winner and a man who set a Ligue 1 assist record in his debut campaign there. He left PSG in 2022 with the club's history rewritten around him.

Pogba's story, meanwhile, was a tale of returning home. He had already done one spell at Juventus, 2012 to 2016, where he won four straight Serie A titles and reached a Champions League final before United brought him back for what was then a world-record fee. That second United chapter was uneven: an EFL Cup and Europa League in his first season back, Premier League and FA Cup runner-up finishes, a standout 2018–19 campaign, but also injuries and, by his own account, periods of depression under José Mourinho. In 2022, as his United contract ran out, Pogba went back to Juventus too.

The Season They Shared

That is how Di María, the PSG icon, the man Rosario Central, Benfica, Real Madrid and Paris all claim pieces of, ended up in the same Juventus dressing room as Pogba, the player United fans still associate with that record-breaking return. According to our own season records, both were on Juventus's books in 2022–23.

Neither man stayed long enough for Turin to become the defining chapter of his career. Di María moved on after that single season, rejoining Benfica in 2023 before eventually returning to Rosario Central in 2025, where he won the Primera División in his first season back. Pogba's second Juventus spell ran into serious trouble: he was released by the club in 2024 after the start of an 18-month doping ban, which was lifted in March 2025, and he signed for Monaco that June.

Why It Still Reads Strangely

Neither player's Juventus year was the one that defined him. Di María's legacy is built on Benfica, Real Madrid and above all Paris, he remains PSG's all-time top assist provider and the all-time Argentine top assist provider in Champions League history. Pogba's identity is tied to Manchester United twice over, and before that to the version of Juventus that won four straight Serie A titles with him in his early twenties, not the one he rejoined a decade later.

That is the point of pairings like this: it isn't that the season went badly for either man specifically, or that there's a juicy falling-out to report. It's simply that two players whose names conjure entirely different stadiums, different leagues, different eras of their own careers, happened to share a badge for a single campaign that neither man's Wikipedia page leads with. Di María arrived as a World Cup winner with Argentina searching for his next move; Pogba arrived hoping to rediscover the player Juventus fans remembered from 2012–16. Their paths crossed in Turin and then scattered again, Di María back to Portugal and eventually to Rosario, Pogba toward a doping ban, a release, and ultimately Monaco.