Atlético Madrid bought the best version of Rodrigo De Paul and have spent two seasons trying to remember where they put him. The Argentine who ran Atalanta’s midfield ragged, who made Udinese look like they had a plan - that player has been operating somewhere between invisible and peripheral at the Metropolitano, and the easy explanation, that he aged out or lost motivation, misses what’s actually happening.
De Paul is a connector midfielder. His value was always in the transitions between phases - receiving under pressure, turning, and immediately committing the ball forward into space that he’d already identified before the pass arrived. At Udinese and early Atalanta, he had teammates making runs ahead of him and a structure that let him operate in half-spaces without being asked to defend for ninety minutes. He thrived in systems that accepted a degree of positional risk in exchange for vertical tempo.
Atlético under Simeone don’t do that. They defend first, second, and usually third. The shape is compact and horizontal. When De Paul receives the ball in Atlético’s midfield, there is rarely anyone making a run in behind - the attacking structure doesn’t ask for that. Instead, he’s being used as a workhorse: pressing triggers, recovery runs, maintaining shape. He does all of it, because he’s professional and fit and trying. But he’s doing the least interesting version of what he’s capable of.
The Qualification He Actually Has
What De Paul has - genuinely, observably - is a remarkable ability to play the pass that skips a line. Not a through ball exactly, but a diagonal that lands a teammate three stages further up the pitch than the build-up warranted. Argentina use him for exactly this at international level, where the structure around him is less rigid and Scaloni allows the midfield to breathe.
The 2022 World Cup run showed it repeatedly. De Paul as the release valve, the player who made Argentina’s transitions feel effortless in a tournament where they were often hanging on. That spatial intelligence doesn’t disappear. It just goes unused when the system treats the midfield as a defensive unit with occasional passing privileges.
Simeone has earned the right to build teams however he likes. But there’s a particular frustration in watching a coach take a genuinely distinctive player and iron out every quality that made him worth signing. De Paul at 32 still has those passes in him. Atlético’s system just has no interest in asking for them.