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Diego Costa and Martin Skrtel have a friendly chat. Photo: Reuters
Opinion
James Porteous
James Porteous

The 9 craziest stories from Chelsea star Diego Costa's new biography

A new biography of the striker paints an often amusing portrait of the violent football artist as a young man

Diego Costa took 17 minutes to make himself known in the English Premier League, scoring in his debut against Burnley (just as typically, he picked up a yellow card soon after). Nineteen more goals in 25 more league appearances followed (seven more bookings).

Diego Costa: The Art of War is a fascinating recount of the controversial striker's early days.
Despite that superb season, and the one at Atletico Madrid before it, there remains a sense of the unknown about the Brazilian-born Spanish international. You know he scores goals and bullies defenders, often slyly, and you know you love him or despise him. That’s about it.
A new biography from Madrid-based journalist Fran Guillen is out this week in English translation to help put that right. It contains a fascinating portrayal of his early days in rural northeast Brazil, through his transfer to Portugal aged 17 then a peripatetic series of loans in Spain, before he finally broke through in spectacular fashion. Though the book loses steam a little in the last couple of chapters, perhaps because this part of the story is better known, it’s well worth a read for the portrait of a violent football artist as a young man.

 

Nine things we learned from Diego Costa: The Art of War:

1. Parallel-trading’s gain could have been football’s loss: “I wanted to give up football so that I could earn some money,” Diego recalls of a teenage job driving to Paraguay with an uncle to fill a truck with goods to sell at home. “I didn’t want to play if it stopped me earning, especially since my uncle tended to pay me more than I’d actually earned.”

 

2. Fittingly, he was supposed to be suspended for the youth tournament where he attracted the eye of super-agent Jorge Mendes – and was sent off in the first game: “I shouldn’t even have been playing … I had already been suspended for four months for slapping an opponent and then giving the referee a bit of lip when he showed me the red card.”

 

 

3. Atletico’s Jesus Garcia Pitarch feared he’d signed a simpleton: “I tell him that we’d like him to come to Atletico and he literally doesn’t say a word, just sits there looking like he’s in a massive sulk. I swear, we sat around Jorge [Mendes]’s table for two hours and I couldn’t get more than three words out of him. I was a bit taken aback and thought to myself, ‘The lights are on but nobody’s home’. Later, … I realised that I’d read him wrong. Diego was just an overgrown kid.”

 

4. He had trouble switching off, as a teammate at loan club Celta Vigo recalls: “Training wasn’t enough for him and he used to play with his mates on the university pitches at 11pm. I said to him, ‘Diego, you can’t keep doing that. You’re going to do yourself an injury’. But he couldn’t help himself.”

 

5. He’s not one for excuses: “If he turned up late, he wouldn’t give you a load of bull****,” says Celta coach Alejandro Menendez. “None of the usual, ‘the alarm didn’t go off’ rubbish … [he’d] tell me he’d been up most of the night playing PlayStation. It made me really warm to him.”

 

6. He’s not a great neighbour: “On one occasion,” says an official from loan club Albacete, “they had a porn movie blaring out [in Diego’s apartment] and the poor woman came down to tell them to turn the volume down. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like making love?’” Costa asked.

 

 

7. You don’t want to rob him: “We stopped at a service station at about 2am [on the way back from a game],” recalls another loan teammate. “When we got back to the bus we found two guys nicking our stuff. Diego just went for them. What a sight! The two guys sprinting away across a field with Diego hot on their heels, screaming and swearing at them in Portuguese and the rest of us chasing him trying to get him back. He was like a mad man.”

 

 

8. He killed his dog. No, not on purpose: “Diego brought his Yorkshire terrier to Madrid but one day when he was parking and didn’t realise the dog was behind the car, he reversed over it,” recalls Atletico’s Paulo Assuncao. “He was devastated, totally depressed for a month. When I asked him why he was so low he practically broke down.”

 

9. His ‘LOL bantz’ game is strong. Assuncao relates a typical ‘hilarious’ gag: “Diego got a big bottle of water and put it on top of a newspaper showing a picture of a topless model. He called Maniche over and said, ‘If you look through the bottle you’ll see a naked woman’. Just as Maniche was bending over to take a look Diego squeezed the bottle and soaked him, saying, ‘How on earth do you expect the poor girl to take her clothes off if you’re watching?’”

 

Diego Costa: The Art of War is published on July 30 from BackPage Press and Arena Sport

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