Paulo Dybala, Juventus and the Problem With Italy

Paulo Dybala did not, particularly, look as if he were ready to say goodbye. As the lights at the Allianz Stadium in Turin, his home for the last seven years, flashed and flickered, and Tina Turner’s “The Best” began its crescendo, he started to cry. Not in the sense of a single, elegant tear rolling down the cheek. He sobbed. He racked. His chest heaved as he gulped for air.

As Juventus’s fans stood as one to applaud Dybala, Leonardo Bonucci, his longstanding teammate, rushed over to put an arm around his shoulder. It was not an act of consolation so much as one of support. His eyes red and his face raw, it looked momentarily as if Dybala might struggle to remain upright.

Dybala had not wanted to leave. Not really, not deep down. Instead, his hand had been forced. His contract at Juventus expires next week. He had been set to sign a new one, one to keep him in Turin for four years, last October, but Juventus withdrew it. The club had scheduled further discussions for March, but those never materialized.

Things had changed in the intervening months, the team’s executives explained to Dybala’s agents. The Juventus attack was going to be built around Dusan Vlahovic, a Serbian striker signed from Fiorentina in January. There would be no room for Dybala, either on the field or on the salary roll. His time was up. He was free to leave.

Dybala might, when the tears had dried and he had recovered his composure, have wondered if that was no bad thing to be this summer. Europe’s teams are still recovering from the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Most are not sufficiently flush to pay vast transfer fees, but that has not dimmed their desire for improvement. This is — as it was always going to be — the summer of the free transfer.

Antonio Rüdiger has already taken advantage of it, swapping Chelsea for Real Madrid. His former teammate at Chelsea, Andreas Christensen, has done the same, joining Barcelona. Paul Pogba will, in the coming days, announce that he is returning to Juventus after his contract at Manchester United expired. All of them will have made sure that at least some of the money that they might have fetched in transfer fees on the open market now finds its way into their pay packets instead.

Dybala might have expected to attract more suitors than all of them. He is 28, in the thick of his prime years. He was, for a while, arguably the most gifted player on one of the most successful teams in Europe. He has won Serie A titles and played in the Champions League final. He scored 113 goals in 283 games for Juventus. He is, by any measure, an elite forward. His signature would be a coup.

It has not quite played out like that. With a week to go until he is no longer a Juventus player, Dybala has yet to find a new employer. Inter Milan, for weeks his most likely destination, has suddenly cooled on the idea, having already restored Romelu Lukaku to its ranks. A.C. Milan, the returned Serie A champion, would be an alternative, but no offer has yet emerged.

More curious still is the apparent apathy from outside Italy. Dybala, a player who has previously captured the imaginations of Manchester United, Tottenham, Barcelona and Real Madrid, has received only one serious proposal from abroad, from Sevilla, that great collector of mercurial Argentine forwards. The catch is that it comes with a significant pay cut. One of the finest players in Italy is available at no cost, and much of Europe has barely blinked.

In part, that is because of Dybala himself. His salary expectations rule out a vast majority of clubs. His injury record might give others pause. His form, over the last couple of years, has been a little inconsistent, though he would doubtless point out that Juventus has hardly played in a way that might extract his best performances.

That, in fact, may be the most apposite factor. In an era when most teams play with some version of an attacking trident — two wide players cutting in, one central forward employed to create space — Dybala does not have a natural home.

He is, by inclination and disposition, a No. 10, a position that has all but ceased to exist in modern soccer. Even Juventus, where the role — as much as the number — carries a certain “weight,” as one of the club’s executives said this year, is abolishing it. Elite soccer, now, does not have room for what Italian soccer has long called the fantasista. Dybala may prove to be the last of the line.

But the limbo in which Dybala finds himself is part of a broader trend, too. Italian soccer is an increasingly isolated ecosystem, a world unto itself. It is not just that Italian players, as a rule, do not leave Italy: Only four members called to Roberto Mancini’s team for this month’s meeting with Argentina, the so-called Finalissima, played outside Serie A, the same number as he called up to his victorious squad for Euro 2020. It is that the country’s coaches travel less and less frequently, too. Carlo Ancelotti may have won yet another Champions League less than a month ago, and Antonio Conte might have helped Tottenham win back its place in Europe’s elite, but they are exceptions rather than the rule.

Gennaro Gattuso was installed a few weeks ago at Valencia — a match made in Jorge Mendes’s idea of heaven — but he is the only other Italian coach in Europe’s big five leagues. The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany and Spain export great numbers of managers, seeding ideas and spreading philosophies. The graduates of Coverciano, Italy’s fabled coaching academy, tend to stay closer to home.

Increasingly, too, Serie A has drifted free of its moorings at the heart of elite soccer’s economic system. According to the consultancy firm Twenty First Group, 138 players have left France’s top flight for teams in the other big-five leagues in the last five years. Ninety-eight have left Spain. Only 82 have left Italy, fewer even than the Premier League, soccer’s great apex predator.

Some, of course, have been eye-catchingly successful: Liverpool plucked Mohamed Salah and Alisson Becker from Roma; Paris St.-Germain, a frequent importer of luxury Italian goods, has acquired the likes of Mauro Icardi, Gianluigi Donnarumma and Achraf Hakimi from the two Milanese clubs. There have been other, more low-key triumphs, too: Bayer Leverkusen’s signing of Patrik Schick and Leicester’s recruiting Timothy Castagne.

But largely, Italian clubs now trade with each other. In the same time period, teams in France, Spain, Germany and England sold around 100 players apiece to their domestic rivals. Italian sides did almost twice as much business internally: 215 players have left one Serie A club for another since 2017.

It is that, more than anything, that may have precluded Dybala’s having the choice he might have expected, once his sorrow at seeing his time at Juventus cut short had abated. Italy is no longer a place teams go to shop. One of the best players in Europe is out of contract next week, and only a handful of teams seem to have taken note. Not because of what he can do, or because of what he has achieved, but because of where he has done it, a global star who flourished in Italy’s own little world.

Time to Say Goodbye

Those of you not regularly exposed to Britain’s soccer content-industrial complex might be blissfully unaware of the fact that a variety of retired players have declared Sadio Mané’s transfer to Bayern Munich a bad one. Michael Owen is “struggling to understand” why a player with one year left on his contract would leave Liverpool for a European giant.

Ally McCoist, meanwhile, finds it “very strange.” Paul Merson was equally baffled. Dean Saunders believes Mané, the Senegal forward, will “ruin the best two years of his career.”

To some extent, of course, the thing that comes out worst from this whole confected farrago is the soccer media in Britain, thanks to its willingness to lend weight to the words of almost anyone who has ever kicked a ball and its desperate need to drag out whatever thin talking point it can find in a long, slow, balmy June.

The reality, of course, is that there is nothing to say about Mané’s departure from Liverpool. Indeed, it is something of a unicorn: a player swapping one major club for another with absolutely no acrimony whatsoever.

The rationale behind Mané’s decision is blindingly obvious: He has spent six years at Anfield, won everything, and now wants to try something new. Bayern Munich offers not only a guarantee of trophies but a consistent place in (at least) the Champions League quarterfinals and the sort of salary that Liverpool was not prepared to pay.

It is so simple that even the one faction that might be expected to have criticized Mané’s decision, Liverpool’s fans, seems satisfied. There is a disappointment that the club’s beloved front three is no more, of course, but there has been no fury, no resentment and no accusations of greed or treachery.

That has partly to do with the affection and esteem in which Mané is held, but it also has to do with the timing of his departure. Mané goes having achieved everything he set out to achieve at Liverpool. There are no unanswered questions, no sense of what might have been, no reason to regret. There is also no feeling that he lingered too long. Perhaps that is what has caused the confusion. Perhaps that is what that legion of former players is struggling to understand. Transfers are not meant to happen like this. Someone is meant to be angry. Everything falls apart if they are not.

Welcome to FIFA’s Party. B.Y.O.

Environmentally, it borders on the criminal. Logistically, it will be a nightmare. There are too many teams and too many games and, as begrudging as it sounds, too many venues. If this year’s World Cup threatens to be too compact, too tight, then the 2026 iteration seems too sprawling, too vast.

Still, for all of that, it is hard not to find the prospect of a World Cup scattered across North America tantalizing. A final in Los Angeles, Miami or (the correct answer, for reasons not quite as partisan as they might seem) New York? A debut for the men’s tournament in Canada? A return to Mexico, to the Azteca, the quintessential World Cup venue? Soccer at Arrowhead? All of it is perfect.

That, of course, is not why FIFA awarded the tournament to North America. It did so because it will be the most lucrative World Cup in history. It might well be the most lucrative World Cup there could ever be. The North American bid team’s own projections estimated that FIFA will leave the United States, Canada and Mexico with an $11 billion surplus.

Not that FIFA needs the money, of course. The organization’s cash reserves already run into the billions. And yet it still felt the need to demand various tax breaks from candidate cities, simply to make the whole exercise more money-spinning for itself.

All of that, though, simply makes the question more urgent. What, precisely, does it intend to do with the infusion 2026 will bring? Will there be a sudden, dramatic improvement on the amount of money it can pump into the game in less-developed soccer nations?

A FIFA employee may well have provided the answer. Earlier this month, Arsène Wenger — a little ham-fistedly — suggested that soccer was missing out on talent because the infrastructure to find it was not as advanced in Africa as it is in Europe. There are no prizes for guessing whose responsibility that is. FIFA already has the money to redress the balance between Europe and, well, everywhere else. After 2026, it will have no excuses for failing to do so.

Correspondence

Shawn Donnelly has a question. “It’s easy to find out how much money athletes are making during the season. Why is it so difficult to get the same information for European soccer players? It seems like these figures are state secrets. As a fan, it’s tough to get a full picture of how much the players are making, and so to know the real cost to the clubs.”

This is meat and drink for the correspondence section: an Atlantic cultural divide. There is, as a rule, traditionally a greater degree of transparency in American sports. (I always enjoy American journalists who complain, understandably, that teams increasingly won’t let them into the locker room; try shouting a single question at Harry Winks in a parking lot, only for him not to answer it.) That seems the most obvious explanation.

But I might be tempted to flip the question on its head, too. Why are American sports and American athletes so willing to divulge their salaries? As a journalist, obviously, I’d encourage it. As a fan, too. Fans have a right to know these things. But I’m not sure any of us especially enjoy talking about how much, or how little, we earn, just as I’m not sure any of us like being questioned about our performance at work while in our underwear.

Speaking of asking questions, there were plenty of submissions for commentary bugbears, too. Karl Thompson pitched, “well, there was contact,” when discussing whether something should or should not be a penalty. Benson Lieber dismissed my suggestion of “interrogating” because it has “become one of the most prominent buzzwords in the literary humanities,” which is more than enough to rule it out. And Josh Curnett volunteered, “showed a clean pair of heels,” which feels evocative enough to be allowed a pass.

And special mention to Andrew Melnykovych, who wondered: “Are you asking questions of asking questions?”