Luis Diaz's path to fame: Once overlooked for malnutrition, humility is the ultimate quality

Luis Diyas has made an impact at Liverpool and is expected to start the Champions League final on Saturday, but how many of you know that as a teenager Diyas was in danger of being forgotten because he was underweight? Speaking to Sky Sports, Diaz's former coaches revealed how he overcame the odds to reach the top.

"He is a player who is hungry for success and knows that you get what you give." Klopp's brief description of Diyas on his £49m arrival from Porto in January struck a chord with fellow Crobians 5,000 miles away.

Liverpool have done their homework on Diyas -- "He is someone we have been following for a long time," they added -- but few have the full measure of his fighting spirit as the managers who have seen him through the first steps of his remarkable journey to the top.

The 25-year-old has enjoyed an explosive start to his Liverpool career. "He looks like he's been there for three years," Carlos Paniagua, who coached him at Colombia's Under-20 level, told Sky Sports.

But not long ago, all this seemed almost impossible.

At 18, Diaz had not even been linked with a professional club. As a native of La Guajira, one of Colombia's least developed regions, and a member of the Wayuu (native American Indian nomads), the local community suffers from poverty and poor nutrition, making it difficult for him to be spotted by professional clubs in the land.

"Very few players come from that part of the country, which is one of the things that makes his story special," Paniagua said. "He is an indigenous man who was discovered by the youth team of Barranquilla, and he has become a treasure of Colombian football and the pride of all of us."

According to Paniagua, Diaz was first noticed by scouts shortly after 2015, during an open training session organized by the youth team of Barranquilla -- one of only three top clubs on Colombia's northern coast -- in the city of Barranquilla, It's about a six-hour drive from his home in Barrancas, on the Venezuelan border.

Diaz was one of "about 3,000 youth players from Colombia's Caribbean region" who came to the event, recalls Octavio Rivera, the team's director of youth football at the time. "At first glance, he looked unremarkable, which is why he hadn't attracted attention before now. "This happens a lot in Colombia with young players who, because of poverty and lack of financial support, don't have what it takes to fully develop themselves." Rivera told Sky Sports.

On such an occasion, however, the scrawky left winger stood out from the crowd, and his talent caught the attention of Juan Carlos Cantillo, one of the club's scouts at the time, who shared what he had noticed with his colleagues. "There are different ages and different levels of players, but Juan Carlos told me that Lucho has different characteristics than anyone else he's seen," Rivera said.

Fernell Diaz, one of the first coaches to coach Luis Diaz at Barranquilla Juniors, was equally impressed. "He's very thin and he's underdog in a lot of direct confrontations because of his lack of natural strength," he told Sky Sports. "But he's got a lot of outstanding ability."

"I mean a lot."

Diaz was immediately recruited into Barranquilla's youth academy, aided by an uncle who agreed to pick him up before and after training. Despite his talent, it took some time for him to make his mark in a new environment.

"A very important characteristic of Lucho was humility," Rivera says. "He didn't get the financial support he needed, but he was still very committed and professional. If you ask me what is the reason behind his success, I would say it is his humility, his resilience and his ability to overcome difficulties without ever complaining or asking for anything from anyone."

"But initially at Barranquilla he was more or less behind the scenes -- or at least he was before we did that famous' leaderboard 'where we analysed and rated all the players in the academy." The analysis, conducted by Rivera, Fernel-Diaz and a handful of other youth coaches, ranked Luis Diaz first among 450 players of all ages in a potential development program.

"We were quite surprised, but from that moment on he has had 100 per cent support from the club and we need to make sure he develops in the right way," Rivera added. The first step was to build a team for him. At the time, the youth team had teams at the Under-17 and Under-20 age levels playing at national level, but there were no teams in between. Diaz is over 18 so he can't play at Under-17 level; He was not considered good enough for the Under-20 level, so an Under-18 team was created to cater for him.

In fact, Diaz did not make many appearances for the team as he quickly convinced his coaches that he was indeed ready to step up to the Under-20 level. He was picked to play for Colombia at the indigenous only South America Cup in Chile in 2015 and has accelerated his progress since then.

Diaz excelled in that campaign, scoring two goals and helping the team, coached by Colombian legend Carlos Valderrama, produce a string of eye-catching performances before they were beaten 1-0 in the final against Paraguay. "He's a fantastic player," Balderrama said after the game.

The tournament allowed Diaz to show his talent on the international stage and alerted other Colombian clubs to his potential, but at less than eight stone, he was still in his emaciated phase.

"Normally we bring a young player like him into physical training at the age of 15, but Luis was already 18 when he came to the youth team, so it was difficult to do it at that time," said Fernell-Diaz. It was this, in fact, that made Rivera determined to confront the club's hierarchy and ask for further assistance.

"Lucho still hadn't been offered a professional contract at the time, so, in March 2016, I asked the club president if we could urgently offer him a contract because we knew he was under weight and needed more support in a number of areas." Rivera's request was granted, and although youth team manager Alexis Mendoza was interested in promoting Diaz directly into the first team, he eventually agreed to send the youngster to satellite side FC Barranquilla, where he could more easily adapt to the level of adult men's football in Colombia's second division.

"We didn't think he was ready to play for the first team at the youth level," Rivera said. "We felt we had to build him up and develop him over a longer period of time, so that's why the option for Barranquilla FC came up at this time." As a professional at Barranquilla, Diaz was placed in a club-arranged dormitory with his club teammates and had access to better resources, including dietary supplements designed to help him gain weight, as well as more professional guidance.

"In addition to his daily training, he chooses to stay in the training gym and do double work," Fernell-Diaz said. "Barranquilla has put him in their first-team squad and supports him in a very, very professional way through interdisciplinary coaching," Rivera added. "That's where they started to develop him into the player we see today."

Diaz was initially involved in training with the first team on behalf of Barranquilla's Under-19 and Under-20 echelon and continues to impress as a member of the youth team level, as he did with Barranquilla's youth team. However, the path to adulthood still presents challenges.

"Everyone has high hopes for him, but he's actually finding it difficult to live up to them because his body is changing," Rivera said. "He's gone from 50kg to 58kg, which is a step from nothing to something, and when players develop physically in that way, you lose certain attributes."

Fortunately, Barranquilla FC's coaching team, led by Arturo Reyes, are well aware of Diaz's potential and have been careful not to encourage him because he is still playing catch-up physically. "This club designed a sports-specific program for him," Rivera said. "They were very aware that he had qualities at the elite level, but they also knew that it would be a patient process."

"So even though he didn't play particularly well at the start, no one doubted him. They never pushed or rushed him, which was very important to his development. They let him grow naturally and let him go out there and play. He's always playing the game in a playful way."

The first-team experience prepared him for the upcoming tournament and, crucially, it also put him in the sights of the national team manager as they built a squad for the Under-20 Copa South America in Ecuador in 2017. "When you work for the national team here in Colombia, you can have friends across the country, and Rivera was one of those friends I knew," said Paniagua, who was assistant coach in Colombia's Under-20 team at the time.

"Rivera knew I was looking for players born on the coast in 1997, so he invited me to Barranquilla to watch some of their kids play in League B. There was a left-back who caught my eye, Gabriel Fientes, and then there was Luis Diaz, a very thin boy but very quick and very solid."

"I knew he had played for Colombia's indigenous team before, with Valderrama, so I had some contact with him and he told me Luis had gone through a lot. But his potential was obvious and, in the end, I spent a lot of time with Diaz at Barranquilla and I was really impressed by his pace and his ability to get into the opposition box with ease."

Diaz was invited to Colombia's Under-20 squad training camp in Bogota and, like juniors Fernnel Diaz and Rivera, Paniagua and his colleagues on the national team were immediately struck by his humility. "When he first came here, the first thing we saw was that he was a very humble guy," Paniagua said. "He had a lot of financial needs and he was determined to make the most of the opportunity we gave him to help his family. He was always thinking about his family."

"We noticed that he was a very shy and quiet kid, but on the pitch he showed the side we saw in Barranquilla. He has extraordinary qualities, although he still struggles with finishing." Paniagua and Under-20 coach Carlos Restrepo have helped Diaz improve his timing on the pitch together, but the youngster's physical limitations have been harder to overcome.

"Bogota is not particularly friendly to players from the coastal part of the country because the altitude is much higher," Paniagua said. "This situation can hit them harder, which means they don't always show their full potential." The altitude has magnified Diaz's physical problems and, although he has been able to impress with bursts during training, both Paniagua and Restrepo have been advised by the national team's medical staff not to take him to the upcoming Copa Americana because they fear his body will not be able to cope with the workload.

"Our own analysis points to the same result," Paniagua continued. "In the South American schedule, you have to play nine races in just 25 days, and this tournament is in Quito, Ecuador, which is also at a very high altitude. We are not sure if Luis is fit enough to cope with such a series of full matches."

But in the end, he was destined to be impossible to ignore -- not just because of his talent, but also because of his personality. "He has a strong desire to be a footballer," Paniagua said. "He has a great respect for authority, he is a polite boy who listens and he is always thinking about how to improve himself and overcome obstacles in front of him to help his family."

Diaz sees the tournament as an opportunity, but there are legitimate concerns about whether he can handle the intensity of the match - "We didn't use him too much in the second round," said Paniagua, who returned to the club after impressive performances against Chile and Venezuela and a much-improved reputation. Back in Barranquilla, it was clear that he would soon be ready for the next step.

Diaz returned to Barranquilla's youth team, where he made his debut at Colombia's highest level. Uruguayan coach Julio Comesagna has a long-standing relationship with the youth team and was appointed head coach in April 2017. "[Diaz] was almost unstoppable," he recalls after a Colombian cup game.

Comesagna has built a strong reputation for developing young players during his six stints at the academy - "he has a magic spell for them," Rivera laughs - and like the likes of Carlos Bacca and Teofilo Gutierrez before him, Diaz has thrived under his guidance.

"That's when Luis really broke out," Paniagua said. He finally matured physically, and the training he was assigned by the youth team became more specialized, allowing him to develop into a regular starter for top teams. In 2018, Diaz helped the youth team win Colombia's first division title and Progress