Diego Costa is a Spanish footballer who plays for the Spanish national football team and for the club Atletico Madrid. Born and raised in Sagarto, a remote place in Brazil, he played a lot of street football as a kid without being aware that he could make a great career in the game.
The remote location of his hometown being one of the main culprits, Diego’s football dreams seemed very distant before he arrived in Sao Paulo at the age of 16. There he joined a local football club and eventually rose to become one of the most talented footballers for his club Barcelona Ibiuna.
Portugal’s Braga was one of the first clubs to have signed him on professionally in 2006 and after going through a few more clubs, the big break came to him in 2010 when Atletico Madrid approached him for a contract. Scoring 43 goals for Atletico in 94 appearances, he was finally approached by the major Premier League team Chelsea in 2014. In 2018, he re-joined Atletico Madrid. As for his national team, he has played for Brazil for sometime before he filed an official request to play for the Spanish team, which was accepted by FIFA.
A biography of the striker paints an often amusing portrait of the violent football artist as a young man.
A biography from Madrid-based journalist Fran Guillen is out in English translation to help put that right. It contains a fascinating portrayal of his early days in rural northeast Brazil, through his transfer to Portugal aged 17 then a peripatetic series of loans in Spain, before he finally broke through in spectacular fashion. Though the book loses steam a little in the last couple of chapters, perhaps because this part of the story is better known, it’s well worth a read for the portrait of a violent football artist as a young man.
6 things we learned from Diego Costa: The Art of War:
1. Parallel-trading’s gain could have been football’s loss:“I wanted to give up football so that I could earn some money,” Diego recalls of a teenage job driving to Paraguay with an uncle to fill a truck with goods to sell at home. “I didn’t want to play if it stopped me earning, especially since my uncle tended to pay me more than I’d actually earned.”
2. Fittingly, he was supposed to be suspended for the youth tournament where he attracted the eye of super-agent Jorge Mendes – and was sent off in the first game: “I shouldn’t even have been playing … I had already been suspended for four months for slapping an opponent and then giving the referee a bit of lip when he showed me the red card.”
3. Atletico’s Jesus Garcia Pitarch feared he’d signed a simpleton: “I tell him that we’d like him to come to Atletico and he literally doesn’t say a word, just sits there looking like he’s in a massive sulk. I swear, we sat around Jorge [Mendes]’s table for two hours and I couldn’t get more than three words out of him. I was a bit taken aback and thought to myself, ‘The lights are on but nobody’s home’. Later, … I realised that I’d read him wrong. Diego was just an overgrown kid.”
4. He had trouble switching off, as a teammate at loan club Celta Vigo recalls: “Training wasn’t enough for him and he used to play with his mates on the university pitches at 11pm. I said to him, ‘Diego, you can’t keep doing that. You’re going to do yourself an injury’. But he couldn’t help himself.”
5. He’s not a great neighbour: “On one occasion,” says an official from loan club Albacete, “they had a porn movie blaring out [in Diego’s apartment] and the poor woman came down to tell them to turn the volume down. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like making love?’” Costa asked.
6. He killed his dog. No, not on purpose: “Diego brought his Yorkshire terrier to Madrid but one day when he was parking and didn’t realise the dog was behind the car, he reversed over it,” recalls Atletico’s Paulo Assuncao. “He was devastated, totally depressed for a month. When I asked him why he was so low he practically broke down.”
