- Jota tragically died on Thursday when his car burst into flames after a tyre blew
- He had just married – they were childhood sweethearts and had three children
- Jota’s death brings the most vivid and public sense of loss as football mourns
They first met in the library of their secondary school and in 13 years together had always maintained a modest sense of where they’d come from. He had no interest in ostentation, while she hoped one day to start the marketing degree she’d once enrolled for.
But for all that self-effacement, Diogo Jota and Rute Cardoso’s lives, choreographed in the thoroughly contemporary way through Instagram, had seemed peerless and perfect, without a cloud in their sky.
The contrast between their immaculately pictured world – culminating in their Catholic wedding near the banks of Porto’s River Douro on a peerless June afternoon ten days ago – and the twisted wreckage of the Lamborghini in which Jota and his 26-year-old brother died is one of the most devastating aspects of what came to pass in the early hours of Thursday. A brutal reminder of how fragile and ephemeral any lives can be.
When Ms Cardoso began posting images of herself and Jota – the love of her life – there had been no such choreography. No fame. They were teenagers – barely more than children – and the images, slightly out of focus, with Jota sometimes forgetting to look at the camera, reflected a quotidian life which they loved. He was pictured in action by a local newspaper, much to her delight. ‘Que lindinho!’ (How cute!) she observed.
It was, of course, his celebrity which made them a property: a couple with award-winning videographers Felippe & Katia Gonçalves on hand to curate what, in retrospect, is the utterly heart-breaking short video of their wedding day, the Sunday before last.
An audio accompaniment, written to the couple, reminded them that this was an occasion ‘that will mark your life for the rest of your days.’ The only time that they would gather, ‘at the same time, in the same place’ with all those who mattered most to them.
The cheesy turquoise groomsmen’s suits and the rather self-conscious groom in that video are a reminder that there was always more than the surface gloss to Jota and the young woman who shared his very best of times.
When he and his future wife met in 2012 at the secondary school in Gondomar, a town in the east of Porto known for its goldsmith’s industry, he was the confident one, socially well established, whilst she had newly arrived from Jovim, a few miles west near the Douro.
They ended up in the same class, where she remembered his rather detached approach to study – ‘dedicated, on the one hand, and disinterested, on the other,’ as she put it a few years later – when he was making his way in football. ‘He managed to get good grades, but without studying much.’
Yet there was always a sense that she, the driving force, had the greater confidence of the two – urging him on after his big move from local Porto team Pacos de Ferreira to Atletico Madrid which, as 19-year-olds, saw them move in together. ‘Diogo also has this dream, but we have to take it one step at a time. Nothing has gone to his head. He’s still the same,’ she said.
She knew all about the way he’d been initially rejected by both Benfica and Porto, shattering the confidence engendered in him by the local Gondomar Sport Clube, for whom he scored 38 goals in one season, and by his endless hours on the terrace of his parents’ home there, smashing plant pots in pursuit new tricks, inspired by the careers of his father and grandfather, both former amateur football players.
She had applied for that marketing degree at the University of Mirandela, in Portugal’s north-East, and harboured hopes of transferring her offer of a place to a facility closer to where they would be, though that would have to wait. ‘It’s on hold,’ she said. ‘It depends on what happens in Diogo’s career.’
They hadn’t imagined things would fly in quite the way they did, with Jota’s loan move to Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2017 after a return move home to play for Porto hadn’t really worked. And then, in 2020, the move to Liverpool which took his career up to the heights.
How they embraced their new English world. In Wolverhampton, Ms Cardoso posted images of herself dressed in outfits which happened to be green and gold and she loved trips to Warwick Castle.
She devoured their Liverpool experience, too – posting more than once with the soundtrack of Gerry and the Pacemakers’ ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ Heaven help anyone who dealt her Diogo an injustice. ‘Rigged game,’ she posted after a controversial game in which refereeing errors brought Liverpool defeat at Tottenham, and her husband was sent off.
It has been in the Liverpool years that the children have started arriving – first Denis, then Duarte, and, last November, their daughter, whose name has not yet been made known. ‘You want to be the best father you can be,’ Jota told the club’s media channels last month. ‘You try to lead by example, give them good feedback, even though sometimes you want to get a bit more rest in the afternoon.’
You sense his wife was very much the rock of this young family. A young family with everything ahead, travelling on an adventure together.
The loss of a player in circumstances like this is always a brutal shock, bringing the sense of a life cut short; so much left unaccomplished and unsaid. Laurie Cunningham’s ambitions very much reflected those of Jota, given that he, too, was in his early 20s when he pursued a career overseas, leaving West Bromwich Albion for Real Madrid.
Cunningham was 33 when he died after his car collided with another vehicle parked with a flat tyre on the side of the road near Madrid in 1989. It is scarcely believable that would have been 69 next month, given that he exists in the minds of those who saw him play as an eternally youthful figure. The same can be said of Antonio Reyes, aged 35 when he was killed in a car crash in Seville six years ago.
Yet Jota’s death at 28 brings the most vivid and public sense of loss. A video compiled for his eldest son Denis’ fourth birthday, last November, captures both his boys and carries the soundtrack of Ever Yours, by Portuguese artist Beo. ‘My heart is aching, but somehow in all the right places,’ the lyric runs. ‘You make me feel like enough.’
The brothers will perhaps not remember their father and their sister is barely sixth months old. Their mother is left to help them all navigate a road ahead, her grief incalculable.
