this is what killed me

The big day is tomorrow, when Paulo Dybala he will marry his partner Oriana Sabatini, with whom she has been living for a long time, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the country of their birth. The ceremony will be held in the splendid Dok Haras estate. The organization of the event will be managed by Claudia Villafane, Maradona’s ex-wife. Sabatini will wear a luxurious Dolce & Gabbana dress finished in Milan, which however she could alternate with another garment made in Argentina. Among the 250 guests, who will not be able to keep their cell phones with them, many soccer players from Argentina. Leandro Paredes will be present, who should provide the wine with his company, but also Angel Di Maria, Giovanni Lo Celso and Enzo Fernandez. Gaby Sabatini, the former tennis player and aunt of the bride, should not be there. Before the ceremony, however, the Roma champion confessed his heartfelt feelings in a podcast interviewed by his future wife Oriana Sabatini. The Argentine touched on numerous topics related to the world of football and also dwelt on the painful defeat suffered in the Europa League final against Sevilla.

Dybala’s wife opens the player’s memory trunk

Thanks to the questions of Sabatini, who will be his wife from tomorrow on the same day Chiesa also gets married, the Argentinean lays himself bare and recalls his disastrous beginnings with basketball, the dream of becoming the best in the world pronounced at only 10 years old, the psychological difficulties that can be experienced even after important successes, the emotions of the World Cup won on penalties but also the tremendous disappointment for the defeat in the Europa League final against Roma.

Oriana starts off by saying: “I like having you here and having the opportunity to ask you all this because I imagine I and many other people have curiosities. The first thing I wanted to ask you is: do you remember the moment, a match, a goal, when as a child you said, I want to dedicate myself to football? “There is no moment in which I made this decision. I was born with football at home, we have always lived football, we have breathed football, we have watched football. I have two older brothers who grew up like me, my father grew up like me, my grandfather grew up like me, we all grew up around football. and my whole family lives around football. It’s true that there is a very beautiful story when I was a child”.

Dybala’s experience with basketball

Dybala continues: “I was seven, eight years old, I wanted to start playing basketball and nothing, I signed up for a basketball school in a club in my city, and we started training. I didn’t know anything about basketball, we didn’t watch basketball at home, nothing, I don’t know why. And during the first game I caught the ball with my foot when it came very low, I didn’t bend down to catch it with my hand. Then, after the game, the coach told me: ‘Either you start lifting it with your hand or you go back to playing football, because here they play with their hands.’ And then I said no, I have to go back to playing football. And it lasted, I’m not lying to you, less than a month.

I really liked tennis, but well tennis is a sport that is a little more expensive, let’s say you need a little more expensive tools. In football they give you everything, that is, you just have to put on the studs, I realized that football was my thing, “All my friends played football. It was my world. When I was very young, I don’t forget, I attended a summer school in the swimming pool of one of the clubs in my city and we made bonfires, we stayed to sleep in tents. It was a very fun experience, everyone took a piece of wood, threw it on the fire and made a wish. “Okay, and I asked to be the best soccer player in the world. I was ten years old.”

Dybala’s psychological problems

Then an even more intimate confession: “In some moments of my career, in moments of great happiness, I felt that I was not having fun. In other words, I felt like I was empty. For example, I would finish a match in which I had scored a very important goal for the team, the whole team would celebrate, there was so much happiness in the locker room because it was a victory for everyone and I was sitting there and I didn’t feel anything. I wasn’t happy after the result and it was very difficult for me to understand it, I didn’t know what was happening to me and it happened to me 2-3 times, when I had everything to be super happy and I went home empty, very empty, even though I knew that I had made thousands of people happy. The first thing you ask yourself is: what’s wrong with me? I mean, as I told you, I was celebrating outside the field with the fans, me and my teammates went into the locker room and the computer turned off out of nowhere, I mean, there was nothing,

It is inevitable to talk about the World Cup final in Qatar: “When France scored the 3-3 I almost felt like crying, there was very little left of the match. On those occasions, if you go to penalties, you lose. We always took the lead, but France was able to come back.” What do you think when you go to penalties? It depends on how the match went. On that occasion, it seemed that everything was going wrong, all that had happened to make us lose on penalties. Otherwise, the match would have ended 3-2 for us and France would not have equalized. I came on the pitch after the 3-3, when the match was already over, and I almost wanted to cry. But there was no time to cry or think. Emotions are put aside, I just concentrated on the penalty.”

The disappointment of the defeat against Roma

Oriana asks how one can not feel satisfied after winning the World Cup, the most important trophy in football: “For a footballer, winning the World Cup is the best, but my goal is to win other trophies, to continue scoring and playing. The World Cup is the best, but I also want other things. After the World Cup with Argentina, I had another very important final to play with Roma. We lost it (with Sevilla in the match in which referee Taylor was heavily criticized, ed.) and this destroyed me emotionally. I was completely in pieces. I couldn’t take it anymore, I just wanted to go home and never leave. The defeat hit me very hard. For us, at that moment, it would have been something historic, like winning the World Cup. For the people of Rome it would have been something unique in their entire history. And I had been there for a year. And everyone asked me: but how did you feel this defeat so much? I don’t know. The time spent with the team group, experiencing the city, meeting the people, the locker room… It killed me that I lost that final. That’s how I answered your previous question… There’s no comparison between the World Cup final and the Europa League final, but losing to Sevilla destroyed me.

In football you hardly talk about emotions. Or what happens to you. Yes, I think that if you get to a certain level and you already need it because at a certain point at a certain level you can’t take it anymore. But it’s strange that in the locker room whether you’re talking about going to a psychologist or needing help with your emotional sideI’m not telling you that it’s frowned upon because things have changed in recent years. But it’s strange. It’s not talked about. But it’s a figure that exists.

After a passage on daily habits and lifestyle (“During my career I have always tried to find the solution to limit physical problems. I would like to never have injuries, I do everything possible to avoid them. It is normal to sometimes get angry or frustrated when it happens, but the only thing you can do is move forward, recover and continue working. I am not someone who only trains, eats and sleeps, I constantly follow a work routine and take care of my body. Sometimes there are factors that you cannot control. Everything I do is what my body allows me to do. If I did not take care of my body I would perhaps have 10 injuries and not just one. Thanks to the work I do I limit physical problems”) and a memory of his idols (“I watched Ronaldinho, Riquelme… Messi had become my favourite player, now I play with him in the national team and it’s a strange feeling to have him by my side. The same thing happened with Cristiano Ronaldo. Just seeing them from afar playing together is something crazy”) Dybala closes by talking about the future: “The ideal would be to start preparing a few years before the end of my career, even if it’s difficult to say when I’ll stop playing. It would be nice to already know what to do, maybe already have a company, a project, and above all when to do it. Otherwise I don’t know, I know many former players who tried thousands of things because they didn’t know what to do”.