6 interesting things you didn't know about Paula Dybala including the reason behind his mask celebration
Paulo Dybala has long been hailed as Lionel Messi’s successor in the Argentine setup. The 23-year-old earned a €32 million transfer to Juventus at the start of the 2015 season after impressing at Palermo and has not looked back since.
The fleet-footed Argentine rose to stardom after his scintillating display against Barcelona in the quarter-final of the UEFA Champions League, which literally knocked out the Blaugrana from the competition. Dybala scored a brace in the first-leg of the tie as Juventus won the game 3-0 and Barcelona needed to overturn this deficit in the second leg but Messi and company fired blanks, ensuring that the Catalan outfit’s Champions League journey came to an end.
Dybala has long been linked with big-money moves to Spanish giants Real Madrid and Barcelona, and while the Argentine has pledged his long-term future to the Turin giants, we all know anything can happen in the world of football and it seems to be only a matter of time before he ends up at the shores of Spain.
#1 His nicknames
Paulo Dybala has two very interesting and intriguing nicknames – ‘La Joya’ which means ‘The Jewel’ and ‘El pibe de la pensión’ which translates to ‘The kid that creates the pension’. He got the nickname ‘El pibe de la pension’ after his father’s untimely death, which forced him to move out of his house and shift to Cordoba’s guesthouse.
While the second of his nickname is a bit too complicated, the former was endowed on the Juventus striker by Argentine journalist Marcos Villalobo. The story goes that during Dybala’s early years, Villalobo was in attendance during a game in which the fleet-footed forward was playing and mesmerized by the exploits of the youngster he named him ‘La Joya’, for the striker was like a rough diamond. The nickname has subsequently been adopted by the fans and his teammates.
Dybala’s former teammate and world’s most expensive transfer, Paul Pogba, had a different nickname for the former Palermo star. The Manchester United midfielder used to call Dybala – Square R2 – the buttons on the playstation controller that allows one to turn and shoot.