Diogo Jota was a footballer who sashayed like a slalom skier. He bundled past defenders, picked their pockets, smashed the ball home from every conceivable angle. He was an imp. He played with a smile on his face. He wound his opponents up. A Portuguese international forward who won the Premier League and a brace of cups with Liverpool, Jota was a joy to behold on the pitch.

Just after midnight, as Wednesday turned to Thursday earlier this week, the tyres of the car Jota was driving in northwest Spain – close to his native Portugal – blew out. Jota and his brother Andre Silva, who was also a footballer, died in the ensuing accident. The Liverpool player was the father of three young children, and last month he married their mother, Rute. It was a day he said they’d never forget. Now, his children and wife have no father and no husband. His parents have lost their only children. The personal and familial loss is devastating.

The loss is also felt more widely. For Liverpool fans, for Portugal fans, and for football fans in general, the feeling is one of profound shock. The shadow of an awful tragedy has encroached on the sacred space of sport, something that provides relief and joy for so many. Football does not stand apart from the dire times we live in. At its elite level – in the Premier League and across Europe – it is as tightly wound up in the gruesome contradictions of global capitalism as any other industry. With its petro state sponsors, its corruption scandals, and its grotesque sums of money, it may even be definitive of the way in which capital has co-opted entertainment.

But over 90 minutes, within the white lines of the pitch, footballers provide ordinary people the world over with an escape from the hard lives they so often lead. They provide magic and majesty, acts of creation that can amaze and delight. They also bring us together. This happens most obviously in the ground, but it also happens in the pub, in people’s homes, across the world.

Jota’s chant at Anfield, Liverpool’s home, was testament to this:

He’s a lad from Portugal

Better than Figo don’t you know

Oh his name is Diogo

As well as Jota himself, the chant referenced Luis Figo, another lad from Portugal. Like Jota, his fans were lads and lasses from Merseyside and beyond, ordinary people seeking moments of delight and amazement in an otherwise often difficult and exploitative world.

Diogo Jota was a regular supplier of this delight and amazement. He was also someone who embodied the idea of potential, both fulfilled and unfulfilled. He gave us the magic and the majesty, but he also mirrored our struggles – showed us that you can have all the talent in the world, but that world might not allow you to consistently express that talent. Jota was both a very good player who achieved success on the pitch, and also someone you felt had not quite achieved everything he should have, largely because of the injuries that often beset him. There was a sense of what there might be next season. But now there will be no next season.

His talent was always clear. He could come on to the pitch as a substitute and score within 30 seconds of his arrival, as he did against Nottingham Forest in January. He was someone who could pounce on a defender’s mistake and score a winner in the last moment of a game, as he did against Spurs in April 2023. He was someone who could rise above the anxiety and nerves of his home ground and turn a 0-0 draw against local rivals Everton into a 1-0 victory, as he did in Liverpool’s crucial run to the title last season.

That goal and his celebration to it – pumping his chest, defiant, joyful, a pure rush of dopamine for any fan watching – said so much about Jota and some of the struggles he had to live with. His injuries meant that there was always a feeling that he might not fully realise his abundant talent.

Whenever he was available, he was wanted on the pitch, even if he was struggling to play himself back to full fitness. Liverpool fans knew what he was capable of. They knew that if his manager gave him a chance, if his body gave him a chance, then he would take the ball past defenders, smash or slice or chop or head it in into the back of the net.

In this way, Jota epitomised the way in which potential sits at the heart of football. For every player who makes it – and Jota made it – there are so many thousands who don’t, so many who get left by the wayside, discarded by clubs, stricken by injury, hampered by one problem or another. Football is cyclical. A season ends, but there is the next one, the promise of another chance to make your mark, to make things right, if only you are given the chance.

You don’t have to be a potentially elite-level sportsperson to know this feeling. We all know it. We have talent but we have to survive. We have to make money. We have to feed ourselves and the people we love. Capitalism has no real interest in our souls. It has little time for the creation and experience of joy.

Diogo Jota lived a life in which he created countless moments of joy for millions of people across the world. How many times did Liverpool fans turn to each other in moments of difficulty and say: ‘We need Jota?’ He always felt like someone who would bring you a moment. It is those moments that will live forever.