Diogo Jota - A Tribute

Long into the small hours of the morning on a bank of the River Douro in Porto, a group of Wolves fans could be heard singing an ode to their hero, to the tune of Abba’s Voulez-Vous. It was late November, 2019. Those supporters, and many thousands more back home, were living through their greatest days supporting this club.

Di-o-goooo, Jota. Running down the wing, Jota. Hear the Wanderers Sing, Jota, We’re all going to Gdansk.

The following evening, the fans would head a few miles up the road to Braga for the next instalment of a European adventure. The Europa League would be Diogo Jota’s stage that season. Nine goals, including two successive hat-tricks, helped Wolves into the last eight of the tournament. And how he would have loved that song reverberating around the streets of his home city.

For eight years Jota’s parents paid subs for him to play in the academy of Gondomar, a lower league club on the outskirts of the city. There were trials and rejections at Porto and Benfica along the way. Not until the age of 17 did Jota’s persistence and hard work reap rewards, with a move to Paços de Ferreira and a first professional contract. He never looked back.

By the time a 21-year-old Jota returned to Portugal with Wolves in Europe, he had already played in the Champions League with Porto, won promotion to the Premier League and been capped for the first time by his country just two weeks earlier. The academy in Gondomar would soon be renamed the Diogo Jota Academy.

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Wolverhampton Wanderers changed forever when Diogo Jota and Ruben Neves signed for the club in July, 2017. A mid-table Championship team was transformed, under the stewardship of Nuno Espirito Santo and his coaching team and the financial might of owners Fosun International.

Jota carried the ball like nobody else in the Championship that season. Every stride he took, opponents closed in trying to stop him. Yet still he ran, ball at his feet, twisting, feinting, weaving his magic. He top-scored with 17 league goals as Wolves romped to the Championship title. More than just that, his bravery in possession – so often the victim of reckless challenges – won him admirers in the stands and a first song.

It's Diogo, not Diego.

It soon became apparent that there was so much more to Jota than the footballer on the pitch. His dedication to the profession raised standards all around him. Alongside Neves, he led by example. Jota may never have known it, but he improved the players around him through his sheer weight of devotion and commitment to football. Total professionalism.

There was a willingness and desire to integrate as much as possible, a humility which made him the perfect team-mate. The strongest of relationships with those team-mates were forged that lasted to this day. “What a special player and person,” was Matt Doherty’s tribute. “He became our brother in a special team and was a shining light within it,” said his Wolves captain, Conor Coady.

Nothing was too much for Jota. He would fulfil community duties for Wolves Foundation with a smile on his face, fully engaged in whatever project he was thrown into. The smile of a young man genuinely happy to help. It was the same with his media commitments, never grudgingly fulfilled. His willingness to give interviews in English from day one marked him out as somebody who understood what was required of the modern-day footballer, even in a different environment from his home country. Long after he had left Wolves, he took time out from a mid-season break with Liverpool in Dubai for a FaceTime chat about a Wolves book project I was working on. Always generous with his time.

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We care more than we realise. Football brings us together. Perhaps that is the sport’s purest artform: that ability to connect and give us a common purpose. It is unfathomable that this phenomenal footballer has been struck down in the prime of his life alongside his younger brother, André, who is also a professional footballer.

This should have been a summer of celebration for Jota. A Premier League winner and marriage to his childhood sweetheart. None of us can come to terms with what has happened. It doesn’t seem right. “This is a moment where I struggle,” said former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp. “There must be a bigger purpose. But I can’t see it.”

So many of us feel the same. It is incomprehensible. So raw and so, so sad. Ours is a collective grief but it is removed from the pain of a family who have lost their sons, a husband and a father. Just ten days after Jota’s wedding day, his bride and three children are facing up to an unimaginable future. We can only hope that one day - maybe in many years to come - the moving and heartfelt tributes that have been paid by supporters, team-mates, coaches and many others offer some insight into just how loved a player this was. A player who lit up English football from the day he arrived. We hug our loved ones that little bit tighter.

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Jota brought us joy. With Jota on the pitch anything was possible. Wolves fans hadn’t experienced that type of optimism for a while. There has always been hope, but there was a conviction to the way Jota set about his work. We were privileged to witness the football he produced as Wolves achieved successive seventh-placed Premier League finishes.

We all have our favourite moments. There is a long and storied highlights reel to choose from. I had a pitch-side seat for the final away game before the Covid-19 pandemic brought a halt to the 2019/20 season. Spurs 2, Wolves 3. There was absolutely nothing on for him when he chested the ball down deep inside his own half. But by the time he had flicked the ball past a puzzled opponent, seen off the lunge of another would-be assailant and outpaced a third, Spurs were caught cold and a perfectly weighted pass to Raul Jimenez ended with the finish that Jota’s build-up play deserved. A perfect counter-attacking goal. And one that encapsulated the Jota-Jimenez partnership at its peak.

But surely the collective joy for Wolves fans will always be that goal against Manchester United in the FA Cup quarter-final a season earlier. A night that had it all at Molineux was capped off with a trademark run and emphatic finish. That was Jota in a nutshell, wheeling away to a delirious reception from a fanbase whose hearts had been stolen by the greatest Wolves team in generations. Everybody Wants to Rule the World. It felt like we did that night and at the heart of it was Diogo Jota.

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Just as Jota’s arrival heralded the brightest days in many of our Wolves-supporting lives, so his departure signalled the end of that era. He has never been replaced on the pitch and Wolves have never since hit the heights. It was desperately unlucky that the European campaign of 2019/20 was curtailed by the pandemic. The player himself was adamant, when we looked back on his Wolves days, that it could have turned out differently.

“If Covid hadn’t showed up I think we could have gone all the way,” he reflected. “The chance to play the rest of the tournament at Molineux instead of just one game in Germany, it was a sad moment. The fans deserved to see it and we would have been so much stronger if we had the chance to play two legs in those knock-out stages.”

As with many of that team, there was no proper goodbye. His final game in a Wolves shirt came as a substitute in the behind-closed-doors Europa League quarter-final defeat to Seville. A month later Jota was sold to Liverpool.

There, he won every domestic honour in the game and the Premier League trophy represents a title that he so deserved. Wolves could not bring Jota any silverware but that sense of togetherness and One Pack ethos left an indelible mark that he took with him in the years after his departure. “Everyone was having some of the best moments of their career and it is something we will remember for ever,” is how he summed up his time at Molineux. Now it is us doing the remembering and it breaks our hearts.

His Liverpool team-mate Andy Robertson posted a beautiful tribute, ending with the words: “thank you for being in my life, mate – and for making it better”. Jota made all our lives better for being part of them. We will remember the best of days on the pitch – a true Wolves great - and his incredible warmth of personality off it.

But the most poignant words came from Jota’s great friend; that other young lad he shared the pitch with at Porto, who arrived fresh-faced in Wolverhampton with him eight years ago. Ruben Neves spent countless hours talking football with Diogo Jota. Theirs was a friendship formed with the strongest of bonds and these words speak for us all:

They say you only lose people when you forget them. I’ll never forget you.