Paulo Dybala won’t be playing in England come the start of the new season

Paulo Dybala went on Instagram and posted a pair of pictures from Juventus’ 4-0 friendly win over Novara on Wednesday onto his story. They both involved Dybala in post-goal celebration, hugging a pair of teammates, thus causing some folks to read into it as a sign that it could have very well been his last day wearing a Juventus jersey.

At the very least, we know that Dybala won’t be playing in England this season.

(Same goes for Mario Mandzukic and Daniele Rugani, but the focus here is the man who has been continuously linked with a big-money move to either Manchester United or Tottenham over the past week.)

Thursday’s deadline day deal Tottenham envisioned making for Dybala never materialized. It was always going to be difficult because of Dybala’s image rights being owned and managed by a third party, which is a big reason as to why the deal with United broke down just a few days earlier. And it’s why Dybala’s last feasible chance to call the Premier League his home this summer never truly came to fruition.

The €70 million deal in which Juve pretty much had agreed to with Spurs never happened.

Now, we are left to wonder what the heck is next for a player Juve looked so freakin’ set on selling for the past week or two.

Does he stay at Juventus, despite all that has been reported? There’s no doubting that, at the very beginning of this whole saga where it looked like a legitimate possibility that Dybala would leave the club this summer that he wanted to stay if the decision were up to him. Even with the rumors gaining more and more traction between the respective deals involving United and Spurs, there was still a sense that Dybala wanted to stay and prove himself under first-year manager Maurizio Sarri.

That could very well still be the case.

But when it comes to this Dybala drama over the last month or so — none of which is really done by his own doing, I might add — there’s basically only one thing we know is for certain: dealing with a player’s image rights can be a total pain in the ass.

There could very well be something else in the mix right now. As we’ve come to see from Fabio Paratici, he’s always looking to make a deal. (He’s not really in the mood to explain why he’s done some of the things he’s done this summer, but he’s obviously looking to make deals.) The Dybala-Mauro Icardi swap deal with Paratici’s old boss, Inter Milan sporting director Beppe Marotta, will certainly be something that comes back up in the press over the course of the next few weeks while the Serie A summer transfer window is still open. There will be rumors of Dybala going to Paris Saint-Germain or somewhere in Spain, too, I’d like to think.

But when it comes to the one league that Dybala has been linked to the most over the course of the last couple of weeks, that option is now a thing of the past. Until the January transfer window, that is.