What the death of two soccer stars says about how – and who – we grieve

I don’t expect all the readers of this page to know Diogo Jota. Truthfully, I don’t really know him, either. He is, to me, something of an avatar; a man who wore the shirt of the football club I love and did wonderful things in it. That seems enough to have me joining millions of people around the world in mourning.

Last week, Jota and his brother, Andre Silva, were killed in a car accident in Spain. The car blew a tyre while overtaking another, then burst into flames. Two young lives, two young lights, extinguished in an instant.

Diogo Jota (centre) and Muhannad Fadl Al-Lili (right).

Imagine, for a moment, being the parents of these two men, both in their 20s. To bury a son is unspeakable. But to bury two? And to lose them at once?

Only 11 days prior, Jota had married his childhood sweetheart. Their three children, the youngest born only in November, are in the wedding photos Jota posted to social media. “Forever yes” is how he concluded his post.

But what of the fans? Can this really be called grief? The mountains of floral tributes smothering Liverpool Football Club’s famous stadium suggests it can. But it’s a strange kind of grief, focused on someone we never met, and who didn’t know that each of us individually even existed. I think this outpouring has much to teach us about the strange ways we bond with sporting heroes, and ultimately (and probably most instructively) about what makes a death matter to us when not all do.

The initial outpouring rested on a contradiction. Even the most ardent fans agreed this was a moment when football didn’t matter. But football had to frame the grief because without it, we wouldn’t have known Jota at all. It is his status as a player that gave the grief its changing shape over those first few days: shock, then anguish and love, then reminiscence.

Shock, because something like this does not happen to someone like Diogo Jota. Anguish and love because once his invincibility was gone, he was – in fans’ eyes – just like us. “The best of us,” I heard one say.

This is not the (sadly common) young death of a pop star who remains ethereal, unattainable. The mourning for Jota – including from opposition fans – doesn’t come from obsession. It’s something closer to fraternity. That’s why the reminiscing takes the form, not of what he did, but of the times we had.

It’s fair to surmise Jota had just enjoyed the two best months of his life. His wedding crowned a golden summer in which he had won the Premier League with Liverpool, then the Nations League with Portugal. At 28, he was in his peak. He was not quite Superman – that is reserved for his flashier teammates, like Mo Salah or national teammate Cristiano Ronaldo – but he was a superhero nonetheless: perhaps the Robin to their Batman.

Superheroes do not perish when at their most ascendant – if they perish at all. To die is to be human. How revealing, then, to hear fans say his death is making them reconsider how they speak about players because they now realise there’s a real person under the shirt. It is therefore no coincidence that the most moving tributes to Jota celebrated his genuineness, even ordinariness.

We learned he wore track pants to the club while others revelled in designer clothes. That he loved darts and went to the horse races with a bevy of unknown staff from the club. That he was still paying to play at 16, when others were in professional academies from six. That he loved the song the fans wrote about him and sang it back to them because he totally got the fun and humour in it. Had he not been on the pitch, he’d have been in the stands. He was a football fan who just happened to have outrageous talent.

That’s what we fans mourn at a distance. We can’t mourn the man as his family does. We can only mourn the avatar because of the stories, and the emotions it represents.

Deaths matter to us when we attach them to a story that moves us.

As if to illustrate this with shocking clarity, another professional footballer was killed on the same day as Jota. His name was Muhannad Fadl Al-Lili. The Palestinian Football Association said he died in his home in a Gaza refugee camp when an Israeli drone fired a missile on it. Like Jota, he played for his national team. Like Jota, he had a newborn child. But al-Lili never met his child. His pregnant wife happened to be overseas before October 7, 2023, and wound up giving birth there. Al-Lili tried to join them, but was denied safe passage.

These are very different stories. Jota is an incomparably larger figure in the sport. Al-Lili lived in a war zone. But actually, that’s the point. If Jota was invincible, al-Lili was expendable.

Right now, something like this very often happens to someone like al-Lili. The Palestinian Football Association says that since October 2023, 785 athletes, coaches and sporting officials have been killed. Another footballer, Mustafa Abu Amireh, was similarly killed only two days before al-Lili.

Amid that sheer tonnage of misery, these people’s deaths cannot shock us, and their individual stories don’t capture our collective imagination. Such deaths are tragic, but their tragedy exists in such a gallingly routine way that people like al-Lili never become just like us. To the extent we attach a story to such deaths, it isn’t one that moves those who aren’t already moved. Indeed, the story so often makes these people somehow more anonymous. And that’s decisive because you cannot mourn someone you cannot see.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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