The Curse of Playing in Lionel Messi’s Position

The curse of playing where Messi plays

The cruel thing about Paulo Dybala’s career was never his left foot. It was timing. Talent like his usually bends a team around it. Instead, Dybala spent his prime being the answer to a question coaches could never quite ask with a straight face:

How do you build a team around a player who occupies Lionel Messi’s position in an era when Messi still exists?

That is the story that defined La Joya. It explains why a player blessed with outrageous craft looked, on paper, like an almost man. Too good to ignore, too complicated to fully embrace.

La Joya: a gem that never fit any box

Dybala’s early years at Palermo already told the truth about him. He was not a nine, even though he scored. He was not a classic number ten, even though he created. He drifted, he searched for pockets, he looked for the ball between the lines, often with that signature glide from right half space onto his left foot.

Coaches loved this profile in theory. In practice it created a tactical puzzle.

He wanted to start from the right, to come infield, to run the game from the space between midfield and attack. That is the same real estate Messi turned into a private office for almost two decades. There was only room for one player to have the ball that often and to take those liberties with positioning.

At Palermo the team tolerated and fed Dybala’s freedom. The structure bent around him. But the higher he climbed, the less likely a coach was to distort an entire system for a player who, for all his quality, was not a guaranteed 30 plus goals or 20 plus assists every single season.

So Dybala’s talent flourished most when systems were flexible and broken, and that already hinted at the problem to come.

How good was Dybala really

Strip away the injuries, the comparisons, the unfortunate context, and Dybala is a truly elite attacking technician.

At his Juventus peak he pressed aggressively, he contributed creatively, and he posted double digit league goals across multiple seasons. His best campaigns placed him among the most productive attackers in Europe, even if he did not sit right at the summit with the absolute monsters of the era.

He is not just a shooter. His first touch is elite, his manipulation of the ball in tight spaces is special, and his passing vision from the right channel is decisive. He can receive on the half turn under pressure, connect midfield to attack, and finish moves as well.

From a tactical perspective, Dybala offers three premium traits.

First, zone fourteen mastery: he loves that strip of land at the top of the box, where a half yard and a sight of goal are all he needs.

Second, press resistance between the lines: opponents who tried to step tight often found themselves spun or bypassed, which is priceless for teams that want to build through central areas.

Third, set piece threat: from direct free kicks to corners, he changes game states without elaborate patterns.

The limiting factor is not quality, it is physical profile and output. He is not a sprinter in behind, so he does not offer depth in the way a manager often wants from a wide forward. He is not physically dominant enough to play permanently with his back to goal. He sits in between, which is exactly where the modern game has shrunk the margin for error.

If you are going to float and be indulged, you usually need an all time level of consistency. That is where the shadow arrived.

Living in Messi’s shadow for club and country

For Argentina, Dybala occupied almost the same mental and tactical map as Messi. Both loved that inside right channel, both wanted to come short, both wanted the team built to serve them. There is no real tactical way to have two players do that without enormous compromise.

When they shared the pitch, one of them had to move. It was never going to be Messi.

So instead of floating between the lines, Dybala often appeared isolated on a flank or pinned high in the front line. His strengths were dulled. He still had moments and delivered key contributions, but he never became the definitive partner many imagined.

International football is conservative by nature. Coaches usually build around the one player who is undeniably generational. Messi had that status. Dybala, for all his charm, did not. As a result, he became a luxury option rather than a structural pillar. That shaped the narrative of his entire national team career.

At club level he lived a similar story, just with a different giant.

Blocked by another giant

In Italy, Dybala faced a second obstacle. Not a direct positional rival, but a gravitational one. When a team recruits a superstar who guarantees extreme volume of shots, goals, and responsibility, every other attacker must shift.

Where Messi attracts the ball to feet in the right half space, Cristiano Ronaldo demanded service into the box and possession patterns that fed his strengths. That pulled the team’s attacking focus into different zones and rhythms.

Dybala’s natural role as a central creative scorer from the right suddenly felt downgraded. Instead of being the first destination in phase two of an attack, he often became the connector into the true focal point.

He adapted intelligently, dropping deeper, linking play, pressing with more intensity. But again, the full expression of La Joya, the version that had the team orbiting around his decisions, never became the default. He was too good to leave out, not quite dominant enough to dictate everything.

When your body joins the opposition

The final betrayal came from his own body.

Dybala’s style relied on sharp changes of direction, delicate touches, and constant checks into space. That kind of agility usually depends on full trust in your muscles and joints. Repeated muscular setbacks eroded that trust.

From a tactical perspective, availability is a skill. Coaches build systems with the players they know they can count on every week. When an attacking centerpiece dips in and out of the lineup, the team stops betting on that profile long term.

This is what happened to Dybala. Even when he was fit, managers had to plan for the possibility that he might not be there the following month. That pushes a player from structural cornerstone into embellishment.

The decline was never brutal, it was more of a soft fade in intensity and continuity. The body simply refused to let the mind execute its full vision every three days.

The real legacy of La Joya

So how good was Paulo Dybala, really?

He was good enough that if he had been born ten years earlier or ten years later, many clubs and perhaps a national team would have been built around him. Good enough to shape attacks at the highest level, carry creative burden, and be the guy in a side that did not house once in a lifetime figures.

He was not quite good enough to displace those figures from their thrones. And because his physical resilience did not match his technical imagination, he never compiled the sort of season on season dominance that might have forced the issue.

His career is a case study in how context and timing can frame a player. Tactically, he represents the difficulty of fitting two similar free creatives into one modern structure, and the risk of depending heavily on a player whose availability you cannot guarantee.

Sometimes, playing in Messi’s position means you never get to be Messi. It does not mean you were not special.