On Thursday morning I had a message from Andrew. We were due to record this week’s Arsecast at around 1pm. ‘I guess we’re going to have to talk about the Jota news,’ it read. I hadn’t been online for much of the morning so had no context. I immediately went to David Ornstein’s Twitter timeline.
‘I can’t imagine Liverpool would be stupid enough to sell him to us, but I hope they are!’ was my immediate thought. Diogo Jota was a really good attacker and everyone knows that Arsenal need a couple of those at the moment. Then, of course, the reality of what Andrew was talking about became real and when it does, it really punches you in the gut.
Because elite footballers achieve so much so early in life, we often forget how young they are. Diogo and his brother Andre should, at a minimum, have been about 1/3 of the way through their lives. At this point we also come face to face with the human aspects we don’t always see with footballers. Their partners, their families and their children.
It is undoubtedly redundant and useless to say how much your heart breaks for those families but it is human to do so. I thought Arne Slot’s statement in tribute to Diogo was wonderful and poignant. Clearly those closest to Diogo and Andre are going through something incredibly painful and one can only wish them all the strength and love in the world.
Deaths of those in the public eye always cause me to reflect on why they hit those of us who are at a greater personal distance so hard. Millions of fans of Liverpool, Wolves, Porto and Penafiel will be grieving today. Most of those who will mourn these brothers will likely have never met them and yet the loss feels profound, even at a distance.
It can be much the same when a beloved musician, actor or comedian dies. If it’s somebody whose work you really enjoyed, the loss feels personal, even if that is slightly parasocial. If grief is the tax that you pay for love, why is it that we love these people so much even if we never breathe the same air?
In 2014, the British comedian and actor Rik Mayall died. The news made me cry at the time and I still felt desolate about it for days afterwards and I tried to interrogate why when we had never met. And I came to the simple conclusion that it was because he, more than pretty much anyone, always made me laugh.
I am slightly too young to have enjoyed ‘The Young Ones’ when it aired on British TV but came to greatly enjoy it retrospectively. But I absolutely loved the follow up series Mayall wrote and produced with long-time co-star Adrian Edmondson ‘Bottom.’ I was aged about 10 at the time and still had a childish sense of humour. I came to appreciate that, especially for men, our sense of humour never really does mature.
The show was silly and hyperbolic and they would constantly make fun of its low budget with deliberately bad set designs. The jokes were essentially Christmas cracker jokes and confected phallic gags. I loved it and still do. Aged 10, I didn’t realise it was ok for adults to find this kind of thing funny. Simpler than that, it made me laugh.
Rik Mayall made me laugh and that is the stuff in life that really matters, that makes it worth living. It is much the same with musicians, their work brings light to your life and creates connections with friends and family. They provide the bookmarks in your life. We need more than work and pay bills and that is where musicians and actors and artists and comedians really step in, as well as your family.
And that goes for footballers too. Millions and millions of people around the world caught a bug at some point in their lives and, almost against their will, decided to make football a central point of their lives, of their personalities. This thing we have absolutely no control over and, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t really matter.
But it does matter. And footballers come to mean so much to us because they are capable of giving us those transcendental moments that are much more than just a moment in time. They mean much more than a nice way to spend our leisure time. They mean something to us and we remember them forever.
What else happens in your life that will literally cause you to jump up and down screaming in a manner that you cannot control? That will cause you to scream and swear out loud in the presence of thousands of strangers who will not blink an eye in response? Footballers are the ones that give us these moments.
When Pierre Emerick Aubameyang left the club in January 2022, I wrote this piece. Whatever water has passed under the bridge since and whatever the clouds around his departure, Aubameyang will always be central to my life story. My daughter was born a few hours after the 2020 FA Cup Final and I watched the game with my wife while she was in labour.
That game and those goals are inexorably tied to the biggest day of my life. There is an excellent chance that his name will be mentioned at my funeral. My daughter isn’t quite old enough to have heard the anecdote of that day yet; but it is in the post. And I hope that she and I are around long enough for her to become utterly, eye rollingly bored of it.
Diogo Jota’s last goal for Liverpool was a winning goal in a Merseyside derby en route to winning the Premier League. In terms of the sort of goal you can score in elite football, it is in the top 0.5% in terms of importance and the feeling and the memory it will have given to the Liverpool fans that witnessed it.
If you are a Wolves fan younger than 70, this is the best period of the club’s history you will have ever known. There is a good chance that Diogo Jota is the best player you have ever seen play for your club. His name certainly jotted down on that piece of paper when you have the discussion.
His passing made me reflect on Jose Reyes and how Arsenal fans coalesced around his goal against Middlesbrough in 2004 at the news of his passing. I was behind the Clock End goal that he fired that shot into and, in terms of raw elation, it is one of the most visceral moments of my life, football or otherwise. I will never forget it.
In the beautifully conceived documentary ‘Finding Jack Charlton’, Charlton is shown in his final years living with dementia. There is a beautiful, heart-rending scene where he struggles to recall his time as Ireland manager or the 1966 World Cup Final. Then he is shown a clip of Ireland defender Paul McGrath.
It’s like someone has turned a light on. ‘Paul McGrath!’ he says, before looking at the camera and smiling. That is the power that these footballers have over us and that is why, when they pass, especially when they pass far too young in such tragic circumstances, that loss is so keenly felt.
