Sometimes involuntarily in the limelight: Blackmail crime weighs heavily on football star Pogba

The French national football team is playing against relegation in the Nations League, Paul Pogba cannot help.

Sometimes involuntarily in the limelight: Blackmail crime weighs heavily on football star Pogba

The French national football team is playing against relegation in the Nations League, Paul Pogba cannot help. He is injured - and is also busy with a spectacular criminal case. He is apparently being blackmailed by a group around his brother Mathias.

Paul Pogba is the prototype of what football calls a 'bird of paradise'. Expensive cars, extravagant clothing style, questionable hairstyles, plus one or two off-field escapades. The French midfield star is currently causing a stir again - but in a true crime thriller he can do little about it.

While his world champion colleagues at the bottom of group one are playing against Austria (8:45 p.m. / DAZN and in the ntv.de live ticker) against relegation from the Nations League, the 29-year-old is at the center of a spectacular criminal case about which in is coming to light more and more these days.

The scandal has long overshadowed the important game of the heavily weakened Bleus against the ÖFB team, but also Pogba's acute injury problems. The professional from Juventus Turin is currently out after his knee surgery, and the World Cup in Qatar is also in danger. Pogba already has enough to worry about.

Five men, including Pogba's older brother Mathias, are said to have tried to blackmail the 91-cap international for several months. The allegations date back to March of this year. "I was scared," Pogba said of the events, according to the French daily "Le Monde". On the sidelines of a training camp for the French national team, childhood friends are said to have asked the Juve professional to pay 13 million euros under threat of armed force. "When I was held at gunpoint like that, I told them I would pay," Pogba confirmed to police.

The subject of the blackmail is a sensitive video. This is set to show Pogba paying a witch doctor to curse opponents and star French striker Kylian Mbappé. In June, Pogba filed criminal charges against the men.

At the beginning of September it became known that Pogba's brother Mathias had been arrested in addition to the four suspects. In a video, he had previously announced "big revelations" and explained that "the whole world, just like my brother's fans and especially the French team and Juventus, my brother's team-mates and his sponsors deserve to know certain things".

According to media reports, Pogba and his mother, who is said to have also been threatened, are now under police protection. On the other hand, there are questions about the actual perpetrators. The current suspects all claim to have been threatened by a "second circle" of blackmailers. A lawyer described his client as "a victim in this case, like Paul Pogba". The thriller continues, that's for sure.