Inside the rise
of Luis Diaz

Luis Diaz has made a spectacular impact at Liverpool and is expected to start in Saturday's Champions League final, but he almost slipped through the net as an underweight teenager in an impoverished region of Colombia.

In conversation with Sky Sports, his former coaches reveal how he overcame severe adversity to reach the top. They explain:

• Why he went unnoticed by clubs until the age of 18
• How he was spotted among 3,000 young hopefuls
• How the Copa America of Indigenous Peoples fuelled his rise
• Why doctors discouraged coaches from picking him
• How he moved to Europe and became Colombia’s "jewel"

"He is a player who is hungry for success and knows you have to fight to get what you want."

Jurgen Klopp's description of Luis Diaz shortly after his £49m arrival at Liverpool from Porto at the end of the January transfer window resonated some 5,000 miles away in Colombia.

Liverpool had done their homework on Diaz – "he is someone we had been tracking for a very long time," added Klopp – but few know the full extent of his fighting spirit like the coaches who oversaw the first steps of his extraordinary journey to the top.

The 25-year-old has made an explosive start to life at Liverpool. "He looks like he has been there for years," Carlos Paniagua, who coached him in Colombia's U20s, tells Sky Sports.

But all this seemed implausible not so long ago.

At 18, Diaz was not even attached to a professional club. As a native of La Guajira, one of Colombia's most underdeveloped regions, and a member of the Wayuu, an indigenous community afflicted by poverty and malnutrition, the odds of finding one were stacked against him.

"Very few players come out of that zone of the country and that’s part of what makes his story exceptional," explains Paniagua.

"He’s an indigenous boy who was discovered by Atletico Junior. Now he’s the jewel of Colombian football and the pride of us all."

His discovery, as Paniagua terms it, took place in early 2015 at an open trials event organised by Atletico Junior - one of only three top-level clubs based on Colombia’s northern coast – in the city of Barranquilla, some six hours' drive from Diaz's hometown of Barrancas near the border with Venezuela.

Diaz was one of "around 3,000 young players from all over the Caribbean region of Colombia" to attend the event, according to Octavio Rivera, Junior's director of youth football at the time.

"He didn't look like much at a glance, which is why he hadn’t attracted attention before," Rivera tells Sky Sports.

"It happens with a lot of young players in Colombia. They don’t have the conditions they need to develop adequately because of poor nutrition and a lack of financial support."

On this occasion, however, the scrawny left winger stood out from the crowd, his talent prompting Juan Carlos Cantillo, one of the club's watching scouts, to alert his colleagues.

"There were players of different ages and different levels but Juan Carlos told me Lucho had shown attributes which were very different from everyone else he had seen," says Rivera.

"He was very thin, but he had abnormal levels of stamina and energy for a kid of his age and he shone above all the others because of his dribbling ability, his feints, his speed and his character. He excelled in all of those areas."

Fernel Diaz, who would become one of Diaz's first coaches in Junior's youth teams, was similarly impressed.

"He was very skinny and lost a lot of duels because he lacked natural strength," he tells Sky Sports. "But he had a lot of ability.

"I mean a lot."

Diaz was immediately enrolled in Junior's youth set-up, the move facilitated by an uncle who agreed to take him to and from training.

For all his talent, though, it took some time for him to make his mark in his new surroundings.

"One characteristic that is very important with Lucho is humility," says Rivera. "He didn’t have the economic support he needed but he was very dedicated and very professional in all respects.

"If you ask me what’s behind his success, I would say his humility, his resilience and his ability to overcome difficulties without complaining or asking for anything from anyone.

"But initially at Junior, that meant he was a little bit hidden – or at least he was until we did our famous 'ranking', where we analyse and rank all of the players in Junior’s youth-set up."

The analysis, carried out by Rivera, Fernel Diaz and several other youth coaches at Junior, placed Diaz top out of 450 players from all age groups in terms of potential.

"We were quite surprised, but from that moment on, he had 100 per cent support from the club to ensure he developed in the right way," adds Rivera.

The first step was to create a team for him. At the time, Junior had U17 and U20 sides competing at national level but nothing in between. Diaz was too old for the U17s and not deemed ready for the U20s, so an U18 side was created specifically for him.

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As it transpired, though, Diaz barely featured for them, quickly convincing his coaches he was in fact ready for the step up to the U20s, his progress accelerated by a call-up to the Colombia squad for the Copa America of Indigenous Peoples in Chile in July 2015.

Diaz excelled at the tournament, scoring two goals and producing a string of eye-catching performances for a side coached by Colombian legend Carlos Valderrama before they were beaten 1-0 by Paraguay in the final.

"He’s a tremendous player," said Valderrama afterwards.

The tournament provided a glimpse of Diaz's talent on a national stage and alerted other Colombian clubs to his potential but physically he remained underweight at less than eight stone.

"Normally, we would put a young player like him onto a physical regime at 15 years old but Luis only arrived at Junior at 18 and it becomes a lot more difficult at that point," says Fernel Diaz.

So much so, in fact, that Rivera decided to confront the club's hierarchy to ask for further help.

"Lucho still hadn’t been given a professional contract at that point, so, in March 2016, I asked the president of the club to give him one as a matter of urgency because we knew he was underweight and he needed greater support with everything."

Rivera's request was approved and despite interest from Junior's head coach, Alexis Mendoza, in promoting Diaz directly to the first-team squad, it was agreed the youngster would instead be sent to affiliate club Barranquilla FC, where he could be eased into men's football in Colombia's second division.

"We didn't think he was ready to play for Junior’s first team," says Rivera. "We felt we still needed to build him up and give him a longer process of development and that’s when the option of Barranquilla FC appeared."

As a professional player at Barranquilla, Diaz was housed with team-mates in club accommodation and given access to better resources, including dietary supplements intended to help him gain weight as well as more specialised coaching.

"He would be in the gym doing double sessions in addition to his normal training," says Fernel Diaz. "Barranquilla put him in their first-team squad and supported him in a very, very professional way with interdisciplinary coaching," adds Rivera.

"They began building him into the professional player he is today."

Within a few months of the U20 Sudamericano in Ecuador in 2017, Diaz had moved back from Barranquilla to Junior, where he began to feature in Colombia’s top tier for the first time.

Julio Comesaña, a Uruguayan manager with a long association with Junior, had been appointed in April of that year and immediately became aware of Diaz's potential during a Copa Colombia clash with Barranquilla in which he later recalled it was "almost impossible to stop him".

Comesaña had built a strong reputation for developing young players across six separate spells at Junior – "he has a magic effect on them," says Rivera with a chuckle – and, just like Carlos Bacca, Teofilo Gutierrez and many others previously, Diaz thrived under his guidance.

"That was when Luis really exploded," says Paniagua. "He was finally maturing physically and the work Junior did with him was more specialised, allowing him to become a regular starter at the top level."

Diaz helped Junior win Colombia’s Primera A title and reach the final of the Copa Sudamericana in 2018, a stellar breakthrough year which also brought a first senior cap for the national team in a friendly against Argentina in New Jersey.

Diaz was blossoming, his performances attracting interest from Argentinian giants River Plate – "River are always trying to sign the best young Colombian players before they go to Europe," says Fernel Diaz – but shortly after representing Colombia in the 2019 Copa America in Brazil, he completed the €7m (£5.9m) move to Porto which would pave the way for his transfer to Liverpool.

"Of course, it is important to acknowledge that Porto have also played a big part in his development," says Rivera.

"But if we had the infrastructure and resources of European clubs such as Porto here in Colombia, I truly believe there would be thousands of Luis Diazes – not just one.

"We lose a lot of talent because of the economic situation."

It makes the boy from La Guajira's rise to stardom even more special. Those who helped him on his way in Colombia are now watching on with pride as he follows up a sensational first half of the season at Porto with more of the same on Merseyside, his performances on the global stage a reminder of just how far he has come.

"If you look at his record at Barranquilla FC, you see he only scored three goals in 50 games," says Rivera. "He was always a winger who created more than he scored but now he is a top, top goalscorer.

"He has had an incredible growth but it is not a surprise to any of us here because his potential was enormous."

Paniagua adds: "I watched him make his Premier League debut for Liverpool against Leicester and I loved it because he looks like the same boy as the one I knew in Colombia. Humble, always ready to work for the team and improve, but always smiling too."

"That’s the biggest quality Lucho has," Rivera continues.

"Liverpool fans are going to enjoy him because he will run and fight for the team and he is capable of magic. But most of all he is a boy who will do anything for you on the pitch with a smile.

"I have had the chance to work with thousands of young players in Colombia but in terms of character, in terms of resilience and the capacity to fight, there has been nobody like Lucho."