Soccer

The death of a still-young sporting hero brings with it breathy accolades and gauche clichés, but it also delivers a strange sense of disbelief and bafflement for the fans left behind. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

Suddenly, nothing: The untimely death of Diogo Jota

Liverpool’s Diogo Jota celebrates after scoring a goal last year.

Credit: Andrew Powell / Liverpool FC via Getty Images

Diogo Jota’s last goal for Liverpool was the game’s only one. It was April 2 and his team were hosting their city rivals Everton in the Premier League. It was an unmemorable match – at least at the time – but one that was decided by some cool sorcery by Jota, who skipped past two defenders in a crowded box and slotted the ball past the goalkeeper.

It was time for Liverpool’s fans to reprise their Jota song, a lovingly verbose and well-practised ditty sung to the tune of “Bad Moon Rising”: “Oh, he wears the number 20 / He will take us to victory / And when he’s running down the left wing / He’ll cut inside and score for LFC / He’s a lad from Portugal / Better than Figo, don’t you know / Oh, his name is Diogo!”

Less than four weeks later, Liverpool were crowned champions of England. Seven weeks after that, Diogo Jota married his childhood sweetheart, Rute Cardoso, in their home town of Porto in front of their three young children. And then, last week – 10 days after the wedding – Diogo Jota and his brother, André Silva, were dead.

Diogo Jota was born in 1996, the son of a crane operator and a factory worker. He distinguished himself at his local club, Gondomar, which he joined when he was nine and for which his devoted parents happily paid the fees.

A relatively small player, major Portuguese clubs were sceptical about his prospects. He was signed by Spain’s Atletico Madrid in 2016 but never played a game, and was instead lent to FC Porto and then lent once more to England’s Wolverhampton Wanderers, who were then playing in the country’s second tier.

It was in the West Midlands of England that Jota began to flourish. He was signed to a permanent contract by the club, helped them win promotion to the Premier League in 2018, and eventually played more than 100 games for them. In 2020, Liverpool – then Premier League champions – signed him for £41 million.

There was some scepticism about the signing. Jota’s ceiling for his talent hadn’t been reached yet, but few others knew that, and the transfer fee struck some as extravagant. But despite a cruel series of injuries, he repaid Liverpool’s faith. A very bright footballer, Jota anticipated things a second before most. He was fast too, and a gifted dribbler, and rarely would you see him relax his defensive duties. Diogo hustled. He possessed a boyish smile, but there was a modestly concealed confidence and grit too – and there had to be, given the serial scepticism he found in his formative years.

He would play 123 times for the famous club, scoring 47 goals, and he earnt 49 caps for Portugal. And then, last week, Jota was driving to a Spanish port to take a ferry to England to rejoin his club for preseason training. Having recently had surgery, doctors had advised him against flying.

While driving his Lamborghini with his brother on a Spanish freeway, authorities believe a tyre blew at great speed – the car veered out of control, crashed and was incinerated. “I am truly lost for words,” Jota’s Liverpool teammate, Mohamed Salah, wrote. “Until yesterday, I never thought there would be something that would frighten me of going back to Liverpool after the break. Teammates come and go but not like this. It’s going to be extremely difficult to accept that Diogo won’t be there when we go back. My thoughts are with his wife, his children, and of course his parents who suddenly lost their children. Those close to Diogo and his brother Andre need all the support they can get. They will never be forgotten.”

A celebrity’s sudden death doesn’t often inspire good writing. In an athlete’s case, there is a young life and famed vitality and then, suddenly, there is nothing. It’s sad and it’s disorienting, but too often the sense of occasion is met by the deadline writer with garlands of clichés. There is often little to say initially, but column space doesn’t care and the gauche inadequacy of these public tributes can resemble the laying of plastic flowers upon a coffin.

There is a life and then there’s a void, and for those who know the dead there’s only shock and bitter incredulity. “Doesn’t make any sense,” Jota’s Portugal teammate, Cristiano Ronaldo, wrote on social media. “Just now we were together in the national team, just now you were married.”

Each of us know we all must die, and that every day hundreds of thousands go suddenly and prematurely, but it’s not knowledge we tend to apply to those we love. In this instance we become like disbelieving children, spluttering and graspless. “Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,” wrote the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I was reminded last week of Dražen Petrović. A gifted shooting guard for the New Jersey Nets, the Croatian was also 28 when he died on a European freeway. At the time, Petrović was something of a novelty in the NBA – a foreigner whose development had occurred entirely outside the United States. As such there was a conventional scepticism about his recruitment, and even when he was finally signed – by the Portland Trailblazers in 1989 – he could barely get off the bench.

But in his 28th year, and fifth in the NBA, Petrović was blossoming. He’d just finished the 1992-93 season averaging more than 22 points a game for the Nets and boasting an elite shooting percentage on both sides of the three-point line. Like Jota, Petrović had never been better.

It was June 7, 1993, and Petrović was asleep in the passenger seat of his girlfriend’s car. They were travelling from Wrocław, Poland, where Petrović had just competed in a European tournament, and were now passing through Bavaria, Germany. Visibility was poor and their speed great. Ahead of them a truck had lost control and come to rest across all three lanes of the autobahn. Petrović died on impact.

I was 12 at the time and, as with the sudden death of Celtics captain Reggie Lewis only a month later, I was baffled by the seeming irreconcilability of vitality and death. I was naive and irrational and I’d assumed, someplace deep and sub-verbal, that both athletic stars and my parents were exempt from the laws of mortality.

I’m not entirely sure I’ve outgrown that irrationality. When news came that Shane Warne had suddenly dropped dead in his hotel room, there was that old feeling of irreconcilability. Warne was so visible and characterful, and had produced so many collective cultural memories, that he generated an illusion of familiarity. The void of death insulted his larrikin vitality – and contradicted whatever irrational assumptions I first made as a child.

What a strange and melancholy summer for Liverpool. Crowned champions of England, their victory parade ended when some murderous goon ploughed his car through the dense crowd. Somehow, no one died.

And now their popular winger is dead, the only active player to have died in the club’s long history. He leaves behind a wife and three children, and that, there, is the irradiated place: the thought of three suddenly fatherless kids. “This is a moment where I struggle!” wrote Jürgen Klopp, the former Liverpool manager who first signed Jota to the club. “There must be a bigger purpose! But I can’t see it!”

But it’s purposeless, of course. And savage and irreversible.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 12, 2025 as "Suddenly, nothing".

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