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It reads like the kind of giddy Champions League final dreamscape that will doubtless be disrupting sleep patterns all over Merseyside this week.
“Luis Diaz — a speedy, skinny, talented forward — dribbled three quarters of the pitch. He evaded the first defender with a feint, dismissed the second with a trick and beat a third for pace. Then, with incredible class, he left the last cluster of opposition players behind before beating the goalkeeper with a delicate, pinpoint shot…”
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… at which point you jolt back into the waking world, sweating and lamenting reality’s relentless realism. For all the neon verve of his first five months in English football, Diaz has not actually scored this goal for Liverpool. Sorry about that.
He did score it, though. That report was written in January 2009; Diaz was playing in a youth tournament called the Zodium Jeans Cup in Barranquilla, Colombia. A photo of him from the time shows a tiny dot of a boy wheeling away to celebrate, the excess fabric of his oversized blue jersey flapping in the wind like an unfastened sail. A familiar grin adorns his face.
Diaz was only 11, but that didn’t do much to dampen the buzz. Parents would swoon at his footwork; opposition coaches cursed it. The local newspaper put him on the cover of its sports section. “A miniature superstar,” El Heraldo called him, capturing the same sort of excitement that has shadowed Diaz during his short time in England.
Draw a straight line from that moment to the present day and you might think that Diaz was just one of those kids — the blessed, luminous few for whom superstardom is a trifling inevitability. Such has been the speed and grace of his adaptation to life at Anfield since arriving in late January, it is easy to imagine him gliding through his career to this point untroubled by gravity.
But that would be to miss the contours of the story, the in-between times that make his journey — and especially the early parts of it — worth poring over.
For years, owing to geographical happenstance, Diaz looked like being one of football’s if-only men — a winning lottery ticket lost down the back of the sofa. When he belatedly found himself a place at a professional club, he was so underweight that their medical department suspected he was suffering from malnutrition. Above all, he battled doubt — that he was too raw, too late to the game, too skinny to have a chance.
One of his old mentors calls his ascent “a true miracle”, and while that might be slightly on the lofty side — everyone you speak to about Diaz, after all, is at pains to stress that he always had dazzling talent — it does hint at some of the resilience he needed to get to where he is today.
Diaz grew up in La Guajira, an outcrop of land jutting out from the north of Colombia into the Caribbean Sea. The choppy waters and howling winds of the coast make it a kite-surfing mecca; inland are vast swathes of dusty scrubland, dotted with modest towns and villages. It is not a rich area: education levels are low, poverty and malnutrition rife.
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Diaz’s father, Luis Manuel, sold street food in Barrancas, an hour and a half from the state capital, Riohacha. He also ran a small football school, where Luis Jr — “Luchito”, as he was known during those formative years — started out at the age of six. “My dad is my hero,” he said a few years later. “He taught me how to play.”
Luis Manuel also visited local market stands to source DVDs of his son’s other idol: Ronaldinho. A bit of the Brazilian’s flair filtered into the youngster’s game early on: Diaz dribbled with swagger and had a repertoire of tricks. “None of my players could take the ball from him,” recalls Henry Peralta, who coached one of the teams Diaz faced in the 2009 youth competition mentioned above. “He ruined my afternoon!”
As luck would have it, their paths would cross again six years later. By that time, Peralta was working as a youth scout — a “talent hunter”, to use the charming Spanish term — for Atletico Junior, one of Colombia’s biggest clubs. And while those who had witnessed ‘Luchito’ become a media darling before puberty might have expected him to be well on the way to the top by this juncture, it had simply not happened for him. He was 17 years old and going nowhere fast.
It was not a question of talent, Diaz had continued to develop well, but he was a big fish in a small pond. Not many scouts made their way to La Guajira, which is not known for being a footballing hotbed. The top clubs held trials, but these were always in the big cities and Diaz’s family had never previously had the resources to send him to one.
He wasn’t quite entering the last-chance saloon when he travelled to Barranquilla for an open trial with Atletico Junior in 2014, but it might have felt like it. Certainly, the circumstances were appropriately gritty.
The trial was for boys born in 1997 and 1998; Diaz was one of the oldest there. The football was unrefined — partly because it was being played by a collection of desperate strangers who had yet not had their rough edges smoothed by proper coaching, but also because Peralta was not allowed to use the nicest pitches at Junior’s Bombona youth complex.
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“There were stones everywhere, holes in the turf,” he tells The Athletic. “They were very difficult conditions. But it was on that pitch that Luis started producing the magic that has enchanted so many people.”
The memories are clearly still vivid for Peralta. “There were loads of kids there, so we split them up into groups,” he recalls. “I approached the game that was being run by my colleague. I asked him whether he had seen anything decent. He said, ‘Just watch that skinny lad over there’. I stayed to watch for a while and my only thought was, ‘My God!’. He was so impressive. I knew I was looking at an extraordinary player.”
At the end of the trial, Peralta told Diaz that he was going to heartily recommend him to Junior’s youth coaches. But he knew there were two potential stumbling blocks.
The first was Diaz’s rawness. “It’s almost impossible to join a professional club’s youth system at 17,” Peralta says. “I decided to give him a shot, but honestly our hopes were not that high. The other kids in that age range already had a lot of experience and were already starting to move towards the first team. He was starting very late.”
Then there was his physique. By 17 or 18, some footballers are walking constellations of muscle. Diaz looked like five pipe cleaners jerry-rigged together with sticky tape.
“He was unbelievably thin,” Peralta recalls. “He was 17 but he had the physique of a 12-year-old.
“I had a chat with him after the trial. I asked him, ‘Have you never eaten a meal before? Why are you so skinny?’. He just looked at me and smiled.”
On Peralta’s telling, Junior’s youth director was not initially impressed. “When he saw Luis, he looked at me and burst out laughing,” he says. But Peralta vouched for Diaz’s talent and was vindicated in the months that followed. “After a while, everyone was talking about this marvel of a skinny kid coming through the ranks.”
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Eight years on, Peralta considers himself lucky to have played a part in Diaz’s rise.
Saturday’s Champions League final against Real Madrid will have extra resonance for him, because he knows that Liverpool’s No 23 could so easily have slipped through the cracks.
“That’s why I always put on trials that are open to everyone,” he says. “Because you never know when a player like Luis Diaz is lurking in the weeds in a far-off village, just waiting for his one chance.
“Discovering him was a blessing.”
In June 2015, Fabinho and Roberto Firmino were in Chile. Real Madrid midfielder Casemiro, too; all three were in the Brazil squad for that year’s Copa America.
Diaz was also in Chile that summer, but his assignment was a fair distance off the beaten track. He was playing for Colombia at the inaugural — and thus far only — Copa Americana de Pueblos Indigenas, a football tournament for players from indigenous communities throughout South America.
He qualified as a representative of the Wayuu, a community of around 150,000 people whose identity is deeply entwined with that of La Guajira. Theirs is a history of struggle, from stout rebellion against Spanish rule to, in recent decades, bitter disputes with mining companies in the region.
The tournament brought recognition, not just from the modest crowds that attended the matches but also from former Colombia playmaker Carlos Valderrama, who helped pick the squad and served as an advisor before the players flew to Chile. (Contrary to some reports, he did not manage the team during the competition.)
Valderrama liked Diaz. “He just had something,” he later said, with atypical minimalism. But he and the team’s coach, John Jairo Diaz — better known by his nickname Pocillo — thought he would benefit from a slight positional change. “He was a striker,” Pocillo tells The Athletic. “He was very fast with the ball at his feet, but he’d often run out of pitch; he’d just be hitting his stride and he’d reach the byline. Carlos and I decided he needed more space to run into.
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“We moved him to the right flank at first, but he liked to come inside and his left foot wasn’t quite strong enough. So we tried him on the left, cutting inside. He had a really powerful, accurate shot with his right foot. He was quick with the ball and could beat defenders with a trick. It was obvious that was his position.”
Having found his best role, Diaz tore it up on the pitch. He scored a free kick against Argentina and then inspired Colombia to a 3-0 win over the hosts in the semi-finals. “He really showed his personality,” Pocillo says. “He was a leader, and controlled everything on the pitch.”
While the campaign would end in disappointment — Diaz could not stop crying after Colombia lost to Paraguay in the final — Pocillo saw it as a launchpad for his best player.
“It was hugely important for him,” he says. “His name started to appear in the media — people started to talk about this skinny, ungainly kid who was doing well in the Colombia team. He started to gain a lot of confidence from that moment.”
That trip to Chile opened Diaz’s eyes. He was a small-town kid with a small-town outlook, maybe too innocent for his own good. This was a crash course in real life.
“I remember that he travelled down for the first training camp wearing shorts and a T-shirt, not realising that Bogota is up in the mountains,” Pocillo says with a chuckle. “When we saw him turn up, dressed like that… it’s an image that has stayed with me. We had to run inside to find some tracksuit bottoms and a jacket, so he wouldn’t freeze.
“He was an introverted kid. He didn’t always participate that much because he didn’t feel confident in every situation. We stayed in a three-star hotel and he kept going on about how comfortable the bed was. Everything was new and exciting for him.
“Before we went to Chile, he had never even travelled outside Colombia. Now he was taking a five-hour flight, staying with team-mates, far from his family. The trip helped him to mature.”
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It was also, of course, an opportunity to express his love for his community. “He was always very proud of being Wayuu,” says Pocillo. “And he still is. People tell me that whenever he can, he returns to La Guajira to be around his people, his ancestors.
“I think it’s that identity that drives him. It makes him want to maximise his potential.”
Diaz returned from Chile with his reputation enhanced. Junior decided that it was time for him to try senior football — not for them, but for Barranquilla FC, a satellite team in Colombia’s second flight.
It was here, with help from coaching staff, that Diaz began to address the lingering concerns over his weight.
“It was a real worry for us,” says Percy Moncada, Barranquilla’s fitness coach at the time. “He was a really talented player, but he was extremely skinny. Very, very thin. Too thin. We knew he had to put on some muscle if he was going to realise his potential.”
Moncada suspected that he was malnourished — sadly not a rare diagnosis among those from La Guajira — and created a meal plan for him. Diaz had to eat more red meat and take food supplements. At lunchtimes, the chef at the training ground was told to give him two portions. “Everything was doubled, basically,” explains Moncada.
Over time, Diaz got stronger. Hungrier, too.
“We gave everyone a meal ticket for the canteen,” recalls Moncada. “Lucho always had two. When the food was particularly tasty, he would come up to me and ask for a third. So sometimes he’d eat three meals in one go. He ate loads.”
Diaz quickly became a regular starter, earning a call-up to Colombia’s under-20s squad. Within a year, Barranquilla coach Arturo Reyes — who later gave Diaz his senior Colombia debut during a stint as caretaker manager — thought he was ready to play in the top flight.
The winger arrived back at Junior to little fanfare. The club had just presented two big signings to tens of thousands of fans at their stadium; Diaz was announced with a photo taken on an iPhone in an otherwise empty press room.
Still, coach Julio Comesana soon saw that he had a player on his hands. “He was a kid of few words, but a lot of action,” the Uruguayan tells The Athletic. “He was courageous against his marker, really valiant. I also liked his attitude and discipline. Everything came easily to him.”
There were two standout moments in his first season. He won a crucial penalty against Millonarios in the quarter-final of the Colombian Cup, then jumpstarted a stirring win over Cerro Porteno of Paraguay in the Copa Sudamericana (the CONMEBOL equivalent of UEFA’s Europa League), finishing tidily after drifting into space in the left channel.
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While there were some questions raised over his discipline — that goal against Cerro Porteno was followed by a red card for a wild, two-footed lunge — the vitality he brought to Junior’s left flank swiftly made him a firm fan favourite.
“He was such a hard worker, and extremely fit,” Comesana says. “He could make high-intensity efforts again and again, recovering quickly each time. It was extraordinary. He was so strong and brave. He didn’t allow us to have any doubts. Once he had claimed a starting spot, he never let it go.”
Diaz slowly started to add more goals to his game, finishing the 2017-18 season with 16 in all competitions and attracting interest from Argentinian giants River Plate. That came to naught, but they were not the only club sniffing around. In March 2019, Diaz revealed that there was an informal agreement in place between Junior and Cardiff City — and that he was keen on the prospect of swapping Colombia for the Welsh capital.
“I am determined to go,” he told a local radio station. “If the opportunity arises, it would be good.”
Perhaps wisely, he and Junior hung on for a better offer than joining Cardiff’s doomed attempt to avoid relegation from the Premier League. Four months and a spot in Colombia’s 2019 Copa America squad later, he moved to Champions League regulars Porto, leaving Junior with €7 million in the bank and a reel of indelible highlights to rewatch.
The rest you have probably already read about in The Athletic already.
Diaz took Portuguese football by storm, lit up the 2021 Copa America and has spent the first five months of 2022 conducting his own personal investigation into how quickly a footballer can achieve deity status at a Premier League football club.
Pretty fast, it turns out.
Diaz didn’t so much hit the ground running in a Liverpool shirt as float above it, as if propelled along by some mystical wind. Even those who know him best are surprised.
“I was always confident he would go far,” Comesana says. “It was obvious he had a high ceiling. But I never thought that things would go so well for him so quickly, especially when you consider the pressure that comes with a transfer like that. I think the club handled the transition very well.”
It is not outrageous to hope that Diaz will be even better next season than we’ve seen so far.
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He is described by Moncada, who knew him at Barranquilla, as an information sponge (“one of his big virtues”) so there is a good chance that Jurgen Klopp will be able to coax even more from him given additional time to work on the training ground during pre-season.
Before that, there is the small matter of Saturday’s match in Paris.
Diaz, if he plays against Real Madrid, will do all the usual Diaz things. And, despite all the pressure, he will enjoy himself. Given where he has come from, the long road he has walked to this point, that part is non-negotiable.
“What I like about him is the sense of joy he takes onto the pitch,” Moncada says. “It was the same in every age group, in every stadium he ever played in. He hasn’t changed at all. He plays happy.”
(Main image — photos: Getty Images/design: Sam Richardson)
