Sorry, I couldn't elaborate earlier as I was about to start work!
I only ever mentioned race as a secondary factor in the ongoing media assault on Sterling, but it was straw manned by one or two other posters into a claim that I believed it was the media's primary motivation.
This is mere opinion, but for me the Sterling saga is a matter of simple economics. The dipper ridden media turned Sterling into a national hate figure because he had the temerity to leave England's second biggest holy cow for City, a club that has spent the last 6 years depriving the rags, the dippers and the Arse, 3 of the biggest supported teams in the world, of trophies and Chimps League cash and prestige in equal measure. Any story about Sterling then, and particularly one with a negative slant = guaranteed clicks from the frothing red hordes = increased advertising revenue for the publisher.
Whether the race element is simply an added bonus for papers like the Star, the Sun and the Mail, or the result of a deliberate editorial decision to harangue an individual (in part) on the basis of the colour of his skin, or a complete figment of my imagination, I could not honestly tell you. I cannot deliver 'proof', because no media institution would be stupid enough to be overtly racist to the point of being unable to withstand legal scrutiny into its articles or to outrage modern social opinion, and so I'm left only with supposition. Would a paper that seeks to reinforce the prejudices of its core right-wing readership by publishing 'rape-fugee' stories on a daily basis, or falsely screams "Gunman is a Morrocan" barely 2 hours after the Canadian mosque massacre (before then relegating that story to 45th position in its online edition, with the comments section removed, the following day when it transpired the 'gunman' was in fact a white middle class student with a Donald Trump fixation), or is prepared to slip an entirely gratuitous photograph of Raheem Sterling into a story about a footballer turned drug dealer, and so on and so on, be above stereotyping a black sportsman? Logic, to me at least, dictates that it would not. Every single Raheem Sterling story, from eating pasties from Greggs, to failing to sell his house, to buying a new home near a dogging hot spot, to shopping in Poundland, managed to reference his income, the cost of his cars, and generally inferred that he was a chicken feet eating, Michael Jackson theme room loving, bling obsessed, empty head, with gobs and gobs of cash and fuck all in the way of taste or class.
As regards the Pogba story today, as it's just a device (and again this is mere opinion) for legal purposes, a well versed means to an end for the publisher to "demonstrate" that it is not simply targeting one lone individual (I provided a couple of other examples of this old trick this morning), race doesn't come into it IMO. It was worth noting the subtle change in tone though!