Diego Costa: Strong but noble

Diego Costa never thought he’d make it as a footballer. The problem wasn’t his talent, but his birthplace. Situated in the north-eastern region of Sergipe, one of the poorest in Brazil, Lagarto has a third of its one hundred thousand inhabitants living in poverty. Scouts tend to overlook the area. The only star to emerge from its muddy streets and ramshackle houses is Costa. Yet Costa loves Lagarto. He returns whenever he can, and he plans to move back when his career is over. Living there are his friends and family, whose happiness was the reason Costa left Brazil in the first place. “My obsession was to give my family a better life,” Costa told Sport Magazine. To this day his family and friends rely on him. Whenever Costa whacks in a goal or barges into a defender, he isn’t just fighting for wins and titles—he is fighting for those he loves.

One of those people is his father, Jose, who named him after Diego Maradona. Jose named his other son, Jair, after Brazil midfielder Jairzinho. Some say Jair was a better player than Diego, but that Diego was more focused. Whenever they played, they had to be on the same team or else they would start to fight. They played with friends and neighbours on mud and concrete, interrupted only by cars driving by. Since they had little else to do, the games went on until darkness fell and they could no longer see the ball. Fights often broke out. “Most games ended up all right,” Costa told The Telegraph. “But some of them didn’t.”

As one of the younger players, Costa did what he could to survive. “He moved so well and learned on the street how to use his body to his advantage,” Jose told FourFourTwo (FFT). The games were brutal and lawless. Confronted by players who were older and stronger, Costa had to be aggressive and street-smart. “He’s been a fighter since the day he was born,” said Jose. “I fought with everyone, I insulted everyone,” Costa told El País. “I had no respect for the opposition—I thought I had to kill them… I was used to seeing players elbowing each other in the face and thought it was the norm.”

One day Costa went for a trial with his hometown club Atlético Clube Lagartense. He was rejected. At fourteen he left Lagarto for São Paulo. “Basically I did not want to play football any more,” Costa told The Telegraph. “I wanted to earn my own money and support myself and not depend on my parents anymore.” He started working in a store owned by his uncle, Jarminho. The store was frequented by football coaches and agents. Jarminho would tell them about his nephew and ‘great player’ Diego, which led Costa to earn a deal at São Paulo side Barcelona de Capela. He had never played under a coach. Yet he started off by scoring four goals in a U-17 tournament. “It’s very unusual for a player in Brazilian football to come straight from the streets at that age,” club president Paulo Moura told FFT. “We knew he was something special.”

By that time Diego’s cousins were mocking him for how little he was earning. Costa was getting some cash from his family, but not enough to ask a girl out for dinner. This embarrassed Costa. He started driving with his uncle to the Paraguayan border, where he sold counterfeit clothes in a shopping centre. Moura had to persuade Costa to continue playing football. “I did it four times at least,” Moura told FFT. “His cousins loved giving him bullshit and bullied him. They could afford to go to parties, the cinema and buy fancy trainers, while Diego barely had enough money for the bus. After a while he came to live at the team’s accommodation just to forget about the jokes.”

Costa still lacked a basic understanding of what was allowed in a normal game of football. In a U-18 tournament, he punched a defender and threatened the referee. He got banned for four months. In the next game, a scout named Armando Silva came to watch him play. Silva was the Brazil representative for Portuguese agent Jorge Mendes. As the game neared, Moura managed to produce video evidence showing that the defender had hit Costa first. The suspension was rescinded on the basis of self-defence. On the morning of the game, Costa learned he was free to play.

Costa did well enough for Silva to hand him an offer from Braga in the Portuguese top division. When Costa told his parents, they thought it was a sham. When Costa added that he was off to Europe, his father worried and his mother cried. But Costa had given Mendes his word.

“If you don’t let me go,” Costa said, “I’ll just leave anyway.”

Going to Portugal at seventeen was hard for Costa. He was scared. He cried. His father came with him, but did not stay for long. The reason he left so soon, says Costa, was that Jose didn’t want to change his routine. On a normal day, Jose gets up at 6am, lights a cigar, pours some coffee, gulps down a beer, eats lunch, then naps. When he awakes, he plays cards. Then he sees his mother. Jose feels comfortable in Lagarto. When Costa had a daughter in 2012, Jose turned down the chance to come and see her because Portugal was too cold.

“He was a shy kid, but when he stepped onto the pitch he transformed himself completely. He didn’t accept that defenders should kick him—he preferred to kick them first.”

Before long Braga loaned Costa to second division side Penafiel, coached by ex-Portugal international Rui Bento. Rui Bento came to adore Costa. He recommended this ‘rough diamond’ to Javier Hernández, a scout for Atlético Madrid, who turned up to watch him play. “I could tell he wasn’t following any kind of healthy diet,” Hernández said of Costa. But Hernández did see something in him. “He fought for the ball with a ferocity I had never seen in my life,” he said. “He was a shy kid, but when he stepped onto the pitch he transformed himself completely. He didn’t accept that defenders should kick him—he preferred to kick them first.”

One day Mendes called Costa and told him to jump on a plane to Madrid. Having played thirteen games in the Portuguese second division, Costa was signing for Atlético. On a December day in 2006, with a temperature of minus four Celsius, Costa turned up in Madrid in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops. After loaning him back to Braga, Atlético presented him in summer as ‘the new Kaká’. A month later, the new Kaká was loaned to Celta in the Spanish second division.

Once more Costa struggled to follow the rules. In a game against Xerez, he celebrated a goal by goading the defender Antoñito like a bullfighter, starting a brawl in which Costa got sent off. Facing Málaga, Costa struck defender Wellington in the head; Wellington started to bleed and needed six stitches. “I didn’t mean it, but he deserved it,” Costa said. Costa got dismissed against Sevilla B for diving and dissent. Yet the silliest booking came against Tenerife, when Costa blocked a harmless free-kick and got a second yellow. “I need to change,” Costa said. “I have no idea why these things keep happening to me.” Celta barely avoided relegation.

In summer 2008, Costa returned to Atlético. They loaned him back out to lowly second-division side Albacete. “Do you have any idea who we’re signing? Only the guy who’s going to keep us up,” Albacete coach Juan Ignacio Martínez told vice president Gonzalo Panadero, according to Costa biographer Fran Guillén. “When this guy arrives,” Panadero replied, “I’m going to have to recruit two psychologists—one for him and one for you.”

Costa watched his first Albacete game from the stands. By half-time the level had been so low that Costa told Martínez he was leaving. Costa also complained that Albacete lacked a beach—he had not known the city was inland. Persuaded to stay, he settled in a single-room flat with a huge terrace, to which he invited friends to barbecues. They’d play poker into the small hours, Costa holding court in sunglasses and a baseball cap. Loud music led to visits from the police. When the woman next door asked Costa to turn the volume down, Costa responded by turning it up.

Costa’s Brazilian music was also forced on his teammates. At away games, Costa connected his phone to loudspeakers blasting at full volume. When Martínez complained, Costa said: “We need it loud, boss—it’ll help us win.” In the dressing room, Costa would turn the kit basket upside down and use it as a drum. He locked teammates inside the sauna. He filled the Jacuzzi with foam by emptying a bottle of shower gel. In one training session, he got his first glimpse of snow. “Diego went crazy,” defender Francisco Javier Tarantino told Guillén. “He dived into it and started rolling about, and then spent the whole training session throwing snowballs at the rest of us.”

Practical jokes aside, Costa liked the staff and most of the players. At one point, Guillén writes, Costa refused to train until the staff had been paid their delayed wages. After a game at Real Sociedad, the players disembarked the team bus at a service station, only to return to find two men stealing their stuff. Costa attacked them and chased them across a field. In another game, against Nàstic, Costa won a penalty and argued with midfielder Verza about who should take it, only to relent when Verza told him it was his birthday.

In 2009, Costa turned up at Atlético ten days late and seven kilos overweight. He didn’t want another loan. Feeling undervalued, he sought a move to Vitória, based in Salvador on the Brazilian east-coast. Salvador was close to Lagarto. Salvador did have a beach.

But Atlético sent Costa to La Liga side Valladolid on what was essentially another loan. There Costa struck up a close relationship with coach José Luis Mendilibar. Whenever Costa got in trouble—such as when sent off for stamping on Espanyol defender Dídac Vilà—Mendilibar punished him. Once, he sent him him to work in a vineyard. Yet Mendilibar encouraged his aggression, and Costa described him as a ‘father’. Trusted and encouraged, Costa developed an ability to drift out wide and create space for others. When he dribbled, he looked as if he might fall over. But he never did. “He has this fantastic capacity for occupying four defenders on his own,” Mendilibar said. “He has this trick of not really looking as good as he actually is.”

Sadly for both, Mendilibar lost his job in April and Valladolid got relegated. Come summer, Costa again returned to the Vicente Calderón late and out of shape. He spent the season providing cover for Diego Forlán and Sergio Agüero. Whereas Forlán and Agüero eased off in training to avoid knocks, Costa trained as he played. “He’s a joy if he’s on your team, but if not he’s a total bastard,” defender Álvaro Domínguez told Guillén. “The more you push him, the happier he is.”

In 2011, however, Costa wanted to leave. Tired of being a backup player, he had a move to Beşiktaş all but confirmed. In his last training session, Costa ruptured the cruciate ligament in his knee. He’d be out for six months. The move was off. Looking back at the incident on the radio show El Larguero, Costa felt the injury happened for a reason. “God didn’t want me to go,” he said.

By the time Costa had recovered, in January, he went on loan to La Liga strugglers Rayo Vallecano. In sixteen league games he scored ten goals and picked up nine yellow cards. Rayo survived on the final day. Yet when Costa returned to Atlético, new coach Diego Simeone told him he’d be sold. This time though, Costa knuckled down. “I trained as if I was going to play,” Costa said. “My life has always been to struggle and fight. It’s something I have inside of me.” His attitude won over Simeone, who saw a kindred spirit. “He was unstoppable,” said Simeone. “Diego Costa transmits a strength that has a contagious effect on the rest of the group. People say he plays at the limit—curiously, they also said that about me.”

That season Costa ended up playing thirty-one league games, scoring ten goals. With more games came new offences. In the Europa League he butted Viktoria Plzeň defender David Limberský and saw red. In the Copa del Rey semi-finals against Betis, Antonio Amaya gifted Costa a goal. “Thanks for the present,” Costa said, whereupon the Betis players had to restrain Amaya. “If they hadn’t held me back, I would have killed him,” Amaya said. When the teams met in the league a week later, Amaya spat on Costa. Costa continued his provocations in the Copa del Rey semi-finals against Sevilla, where he single-handedly triggered the dismissals of assistant coach Juan Carlos Carcedo, midfielder Geoffrey Kondogbia, and defender Gary Medel, who on his way off the pitch kicked a plastic chair. To top off his masterpiece, Costa scored in the final against Real Madrid, in which José Mourinho was sent to the stands.

In summer 2013, Atlético sold Falcao to Monaco. Rather than signing a new striker, Simeone built his attack around Costa. The lead role transformed Costa. He charged down the channels, creating free-kicks, chances and goals out of nothing. He dived to win penalties. He outmuscled defenders. At Getafe he slid in a cross and crashed into the post, splitting his shin so you could see the bone. “Another scratch doesn’t hurt the tiger,” Simeone said. By late May, Costa had slammed in twenty-seven goals to help Atleti win a sensational league title.

“My challenges are strong but noble at the same time. Check my records: you’ll find I’ve never caused a bad injury to a player.”

The only thing that marred the season was the way it ended. In the Champions League final, an unfit Costa limped off as Real Madrid won 4-1 in extra time. Then came the World Cup. Costa had been called up for Brazil in 2013, but felt unappreciated and switched to Spain. “He is turning his back on a dream of millions,” said Brazil coach Luiz Felipe Scolari. When Costa played for Spain at the World Cup in Salvador, fans booed him. His family admitted that, should he score against Brazil, it would be hard for them to live in Lagarto. Though Spain flopped, Costa would have had no problems shooting down his own country. Before the World Cup he had been asked on El Larguero whether he’d celebrate scoring against Brazil in the final at the Maracanã. Costa shrugged. “Why not?”

Some say Mourinho is the managerial equivalent of Diego Costa. In 2014 Mourinho brought him to Chelsea. “When he was in Portugal I didn’t look at him,” said Mourinho. “No one looked at him. I was blind and so was everybody else.”

Trouble followed Costa immediately. He taunted Seamus Coleman for an own goal and throttled Pablo Zabaleta. In the Carling Cup semi-finals against Liverpool in January, he trod on Emre Can, stamped on Martin Škrtel and wrestled Steven Gerrard to the ground. Costa didn’t get sent off. On TV, Sky Sports pundits condemned Costa as a headline read ‘Costa’s Crimes’. The next weekend Mourinho made an extraordinary appearance on Sky’s Goals on Sunday—a show usually reserved for chit-chat—to attack the channel’s coverage. Costa got a three-match ban. “Back in the old days there used to be way more contact and a lot of things that were permitted,” Costa told The Telegraph. “These days everyone is looking at it and I don’t think that’s good for the game.” Speaking to Sport magazine, Costa added: “My challenges are strong but noble at the same time. Check my records: you’ll find I’ve never caused a bad injury to a player.”

After his goals had fired Chelsea to the title, Costa returned to pre-season overweight. Though Chelsea collapsed, he retained his ability to thrive on the fringes of the law. In a 2-0 win at home to Arsenal, Costa engineered the dismissal of Gabriel Paulista like only he could. First Costa planted his palms in the face of Laurent Koscielny, then struck him with his left arm and barged him to the floor. Gabriel then pulled Costa away. “Bad move,” wrote The Guardian’s Barney Ronay. “Like a virus, he had a new host. And so he was off: chuntering, jostling, niggling, muttering in Gabriel’s ear and basically begging, pleading with him to kick him. Come on. Do it. Kick me. And so Gabriel kicked him, or rather flicked a leg back at him—bingo Diego!—right in front of the referee. At which point Costa instantly became the guardian of the game, football’s last true gentleman, shocked—shocked!—to see such rough play, shaking his head sadly as Gabriel exited pursued by a steward.”

Costa finished the game having made no fouls at all. “He should have been sent off twice,” said Arsène Wenger. The FA rescinded the red card and banned Costa for three games, but the points went to Chelsea. More antics followed. In a 3-3 draw at home to Everton in January, Costa went down just outside the pitch clutching his leg in pain. When he noticed that play didn’t stop, he dragged himself onto the pitch and continued to roll around. The next time he faced Everton, in the FA Cup in March, he got his only red card for Chelsea when confronting Gareth Barry. Costa appeared to bite Barry, though Barry denied that he did. Costa, who at first refused to leave the pitch, got another three-match ban.

In 2016, new Chelsea coach Antonio Conte retrained Costa as a target man. The new role did not come easy, but Costa adapted well. In January, however, a big offer from Chinese club Tianjin Quanjian turned his head. After the move collapsed, Costa lost form and fell out with Conte. Yet Chelsea still took the title with a win at West Bromwich Albion. After the game, Conte emerged late to talk to the press, making his players wait. As Conte answers questions, Costa and some team-mates watch near the huddle of journalists. Costa starts moaning. “Finish!” he says. Restless, he starts hoisting himself up via a metal bar. David Luiz breaks down in laughter. Costa then perches a fire extinguisher on his right shoulder and threatens to open fire unless they finish up. Nervous journalists look behind them. “Last one!” Costa shouts.

A few months later, Conte texted Costa to say he was no longer in his plans. Chelsea left Costa out of the Champions League squad and blocked his access to the first-team. Rather than returning from his summer holiday, Costa stayed in Lagarto. He spent time with his family, watched TV and put on weight. By the time The Daily Mail visited him at his home in August, Costa had partied in an Atlético shirt and gone jet-skiing with his dog. Chelsea had wanted him to train with the reserves, and had fined him several weeks’ wages. “I’m not a criminal,” Costa said.

Chelsea eventually sold him back to Atlético, the only club he wanted to play for. He turned up at Madrid airport with a belly, but that vanished as soon as he started working with Óscar Ortega, the feared Atleti fitness coach. Costa trained hard and boxed in a gym owned by Fernando Torres. Soon he had lost eight kilos. When he made his league debut against Getafe in January, he scored, charged into the stands and got a second yellow card. It was as if nothing had changed. “Diego brings us intensity, directness, more strength in attack,” said Simeone. “And above all, he transmits fear.”

Costa had initially worried that his hiatus would wreck his World Cup chances. But in March, Spain boss Julen Lopetegui called him up for a round of friendlies. Costa met up with Sergio Ramos, with whom he had had brutal battles before moving to Chelsea. Videos show Costa trash-talking Ramos and flinging spit at his face. Ramos returns the favour. Yet once the final whistle sounds, they hug. “I have a go at defenders and they have a go at me,” Costa told The Telegraph. “We argue. Whatever happens on the pitch stays on the pitch. After the game I shake hands with the defender. Job done, I go home, he goes home. We’re all mates. It’s all good. That’s how I see football.”

Costa says he won’t change his game until he hangs up his boots and moves back to Lagarto, where his grateful friends and family await him. “On the pitch, I fight to continue to lead the life I have off it,” he told FFT. “Every time I score I’m happy for myself of course, but I know it makes a lot more of the people I’m closest to in life even more happy because they depend on me for their own lives.” In Lagarto, Costa also funds a non-profit football academy that keep kids off the streets. “The children there will get the chance I never had,” Costa told The Guardian.

Those who know Costa say that, off the pitch, he is a joker. The man himself says he is ‘relaxed and very happy’. “He can have a bust-up with you and be close to killing you,” Valladolid player Marcos told Guillén. “Then a few hours later you’re having dinner together.” He is certainly more sensitive: when Costa once killed his pet dog by accidentally reversing his car, he was depressed for a month. “He is still the guy that comes from a very small village behind the sunset,” Mourinho said. “It is difficult to arrive there but he is still that man. Still that naive, pure and humble guy.”