Diogo Jota, Legendary Striker

Diogo Jota was one of the best finishers Liverpool and the Premier League ever saw.

What do you say when there are no words. Diogo Jota has died.

I cried when I heard the news, then felt sick. You feel like you know your favourite sportspeople even though you’ve never met them. But you watch them in action once or twice a week, rooting for them to succeed. How often do you see your closest friends or members of your family? Probably less often.

I opened my laptop this morning to find the most recent two tabs were Jota’s Understat and FBRef pages. I was looking at them yesterday and pondering an article on the Portuguese forward. A reply to a previous newsletter post had suggested that we wouldn’t see peak Jota again. I wasn’t so sure, so wanted to look into it:

None of it matters now, if it ever did. So much energy is expended following sport when it’s ultimately meaningless when measured against the loss of Jota and his brother, André Silva.

As I can’t think about or concentrate on anything else, here’s a brief tribute to Jota through the medium I do best.

Across his time with Liverpool, 113 players scored at least 13 Premier League goals. Erling Haaland was the only one who scored more non-penalty goals per 90 minutes.

If you want to measure finishing prowess since 1992, shots on target is the only metric you can use to do it.

There are 39 men who’ve put at least 50 non-penalty efforts on target for Liverpool in the previous 33 years of top flight football. Jota converted a higher percentage of them than anyone else.

If we expand our search to players with at least 150 shots on target in the Premier League era, the former Wolves man is joint-fourth.

Very few could keep pace with Jota once he had a clear shot at goal. There won’t have been many so ambidextrous with their feet either. His 24 league goals across his first two campaigns with the Reds were split 10-7-7 for right foot, left foot and head. Those numbers inevitably grew apart but he finished with 23 in the league with his stronger peg, 24 with his head or weaker foot.

Imagine the numbers he might have reached if he hadn’t gone 53 weeks without a league goal between the Aprils of 2022 and 2023. But then that is the career of most sportspeople; ups and downs, peaks and troughs. There was never a lack of endeavour from the Reds’ number 20 at any point.

Jota ended his drought by putting Liverpool 3-1 up against Leeds United. It became a running joke that he was the man to call for if you needed a game putting to bed. There was little in the way of stat-padding on Diogo’s CV.

I researched this phenomenon in April 2024, using the term ‘important goals’ to denote those scored when the game state was no more than one in either direction. Jota had a higher proportion of these vital strikes than any of Haaland, Harry Kane, Mohamed Salah, Heung-min Son or Ollie Watkins from the summer of 2020 to that point.

I’ve updated the standings to include the 13 players who scored at least 47 Premier League goals in the time that Jota spent with the Reds.

It was hard to better Jota for the regularity with which he delivered important goals. Other players may have scored more of them, but only in part as they played more minutes.

You’ll be sorely missed, Diogo. You were almost as good a footballer as you were a man. Love you, mate x