Everything happened so quickly, so happily naturally, so unexpectedly, that these days, resting with his family in Barrancas, Guajira, he will hardly be understanding everything. Louis Diazwho has summed up the four happiest years of his life in a few words: “sometimes I don’t believe it”.
And it is true that everything went much faster than expected, that no one, not even the most optimistic, saw such an impact coming in a Liverpool so full of top-level alternatives, that even without speaking English, the boy with the eternal smile made his way , one of the features that most surprises Jürgen Klopp himself.
What everyone did know, from the moment his performance at Anfield was reported, is that he had the ‘red’ DNA. And they knew it for a fact thanks, as the DT explained, to their own version of Sherlock Holmes: his team of international scouts.
The German told, step by step, how they were convinced to go for the Colombian in January, when nobody expected him and when Tottenham threatened to take him away.
According to him, it’s all down to his assistant Pep Lijnders and elite development coach Vitor Matos, both of whom had previously worked at Porto. In fact, the latter was at the club when Díaz was signed by Junior de Barranquilla and since he saw him, he raised the alarm in Liverpool.
“We don’t get to take a close look at all the interesting players, neither me nor the coaches. Our scouts are doing that and that’s what we have that department for. Very often we just get a hint that we should take a closer look and we do that. It means that he is a player for us in the next transfer window, but with Porto it is obviously different because of Pep and Vitor (Matos),” he said, quoted by the Liverpool Echo.
“I’m not sure, but Vitor probably watches all the Porto games and Pep watches a lot of them, and they came very early and told me: ‘that’s a very interesting boy over there and we should take a closer look at him’. We’ve been watching him ever since It’s part of the process. We can’t constantly watch the whole world, but the club is quite busy with it. If there is a good player or a real talent, we know him.”
And so, without much fanfare but with a lot of study, the talent was signed: “we just have to make decisions about whether it’s interesting for us or not, do we have someone in that position or not, do we have someone in that position, do we have a young player to follow? All this kind of stuff. That’s the process.”
This is how Diogo Jota arrived from the Wolves, after passing through Porto, in exchange for 52 million euros and Darwin Núñez could also arrive, one of the strongest candidates after the confirmation of an agreement between Sadio Mané and Bayern Munich, more beyond that the clubs have not yet agreed. What is a fact is that in Klopp’s numerous work team nothing, absolutely nothing, happens by chance. Everything is studied in detail and that is why, when a Díaz emerges in his best dimension, they secretly smile. They always know what to expect.
