On what would turn out to be the very last afternoon of his short life, Diogo Jota used Instagram to post a 75-second video montage of his recent wedding to Rute Cardoso, the mother of his three children.
It had, he declared, been ‘a day we shall never forget’.
Rute, his childhood sweetheart, also posted photos of last month’s festivities, which had involved a Catholic ceremony at one of Porto’s most fetching Renaissance churches followed by a lavish reception at a castle in the hills outside their native city.
‘My dream came true,’ she said.
‘But I’m the lucky one,’ replied her newly-minted husband.
The touching exchange, which remains online next to photos of the happy couple posing at the altar, only adds to the unspeakable sense of tragedy about the 28-year-old Liverpool footballer’s sudden death, so soon afterwards.
Jota’s two young sons – Dinis, four, and Duarte, two – can be seen in some of the accompanying images, alongside their infant sister. They wear identical blue suits to the groom, plus a touchingly similar smile on a happy family occasion which, cruelly, is destined to be among their last memories of their father.
It’s perhaps a cliché to say that superstars who perish at the height of their powers were cut down in their prime.
But there is surely no better way to describe the tragic loss of a role model whose recent career had taken him to the very peak of professional football.
Recent weeks had not only seen Diogo Jota lift the Premier League trophy for an English club whose fans have taken him to their hearts since his arrival four years ago, but also win the Nations League with Portugal in Munich, coming on in extra time of a gripping final against rivals Spain which ended via a penalty shootout.
The exact circumstances of his death in the early hours of yesterday morning, on the A-52 highway in northern Spain, are still being pieced together. However early reports suggest that Diogo and his brother Andre Silva came off the road after suffering a tyre blowout while overtaking at speed.
Their car, a lime green Lamborghini Huracan Evo Spyder, a model which starts at around £188,000 and has a top speed of 202mph, appears to have then hit the central reservation before coming off the road and bursting into flames.
Both Diogo and Andre, who is also a professional footballer for the Portuguese second division side Penafiel, seem to have perished by the time emergency services arrived. Photographs of the scene, near to a remote town named Cernadilla, show charred remains of the supercar next to pieces of crash barrier on the blackened grass.
‘The information we have so far is that the car… was in a road traffic accident and left the road due to a tyre blowout while overtaking,’ said a spokesman for Spain’s Guardia Civil yesterday. ‘The car caught on fire and the two occupants were killed.’
The brothers are reported to have been driving through the night to Santander, from where they intended to catch a ferry to Portsmouth. Jota, who was due back in the UK for pre-season training, had been advised not to fly after having a scheduled operation on his lungs to fix an unspecified pulmonary condition just a few days earlier.
In the cash-soaked and often highly rapacious world of modern football, fans are now mourning that rarest of breeds: a genuine gentleman, and model professional who wore his stratospheric wealth and talent remarkably lightly.
A picture of respectability, alongside his heavily tattooed contemporaries, he played with a smile on his face and fierce work ethic, rarely berating officials or indulging in theatrics designed to secure cheap free kicks. Off the pitch, he preferred quiet domestic gatherings with childhood sweetheart Rute to the dimly lit fleshpots of Premier League lore.
Perhaps his only vice was video gaming, a pursuit in which he invested endless hours, competing in the recent eSports world cup in Saudi Arabia. The family home on Merseyside reputedly contained an entire room devoted to the hobby, kitted out with special chairs and vast plasma screens. In 2021, he achieved the No.1 ranking globally in an online game FIFA Ultimate Team (later FC Ultimate Team).
As for Rute, who he’d married just 12 days ago, she was a genuine childhood sweetheart.
The couple had met at high school in Porto, when they were both aged 13, and chronicled their journey from love-struck teenagers to fame and fortune via social media feeds.
Alongside a host of family portraits, which now take on extraordinary poignancy, their Instagram accounts contain endless images of the couple’s three pet beagles, plus occasional photos of the exotic holidays that £140,000-a-week footballers are able to afford. Recent months had brought visits to Sardinia, Dubai and Lapland, while previous off seasons had taken them to the Maldives and Mauritius.
Last night, the devastated Rute posted to Instagram a video of the moment Jota had proposed to her, in 2022. It begins with a footage of a picturesque lake, where a table is set up for dinner, with an engagement ring in a white box on the table. The couple can then be seen embracing and running together across a candlelit lawn.
In normal circumstances, such footage might be considered schmaltzy. Given yesterday’s events, it just feels incredibly sad.
Jota was born Diogo José Teixeira da Silva, on December 4, 1996, and grew up in Aguiar, a working-class suburb of Porto. His father Joaquim, who in his youth had played for a lower league club called UD Sousense, worked for a crane firm, while mother Isabel was a factory worker making electronic parts for cars.
Diogo and Andre both attended the local primary school and began playing football for the neighbourhood side Gondomar SC before being offered places in the youth system of Pacos de Ferreira, one of Porto’s smaller professional clubs.
It was here that Diogo chose to use the name ‘Jota’ to help distinguish himself from other players named Diogo and Silva in the organisation’s youth set up.
On the field, he nonetheless initially found it hard to stand out, claiming to have been less naturally talented than many of his peers. Yet like many who ultimately succeed in professional sport, he was able to navigate football’s greasy pole thanks to a prodigious work ethic.
‘This hunger has been with me ever since I can remember,’ he told Sky Sports in 2022. ‘In my youth, growing up, I never played for the big teams. I had a few teammates who went to Porto or Benfica. I had trials there but I never stayed. I was one of the better ones, but never the best.’
Father Joaquim once suggested that Diogo’s competitive nature was fuelled by his modest family background. ‘He saw first-hand the difficulties his parents faced. We were factory workers, we didn’t earn much above the minimum wage and we never hid our limitations from our children,’ he told the Spanish sports magazine Maisfutebol in 2020, adding that he felt ‘proud and moved’ at his son’s subsequent success.
Jota made his debut for the Pacos de Ferreira senior side in 2014, at the age of 18, and went on to make 47 appearances as either a striker or lively right winger, before being signed by the Spanish giants Atletico Madrid two years later.
They deemed him surplus to requirements, so quickly allowed him to return home on loan to Porto, where he scored nine goals in 38 appearances, before sending him to the UK, where he joined then-Championship side Wolves on loan for 2017-18, helping them achieve promotion to the Premier League as champions.
His move was made permanent a few months later, and he cemented his status as a bona fide Premier League forward during their first season in the top flight, scoring nine goals as they achieved their best ever Premier League finish of seventh and qualified for the Europa League.
Rute, who had followed him to the Black Country, quickly became a devoted Anglophile, posting regularly about her love of British culture, along with the TV show Peaky Blinders.
Jota would eventually score 44 goals in 131 appearances for Wolves before Liverpool came calling, signing him in September 2020 for a blockbuster fee of £45 million.
There he became a key figure in Jurgen Klopp’s squad, playing as a centre-forward as well as a winger, and helping the side win both the FA Cup and the Carabao Cup, while also reaching the final of the Champions League.
Last year head coach Arne Slot’s first season at the club, Jota scored nine goals in all competitions as Liverpool won the Premier League, the first league title of Jota’s career.
‘Diogo was the most unassuming footballer’, is how one Liverpool insider described his appeal yesterday. ‘A model professional, generous with his time. While he wasn’t necessarily the main man – like your Mo Salahs, or Cristiano Ronaldos at his international side Portugal – he would run all day, work his socks off, never settle for second best.
‘Fans love that, because while people like him might not make all the headlines, he was the type of player you absolutely need if you are going to win the league. The sort of guy who could come on as a sub, after not playing for four games, and score a crucial goal. He’d train perfectly, look after himself, never give the manager headaches. It’s just the most unspeakable tragedy that he’s gone.’