Diego Costa is laughing at memories. He is discussing his childhood in northern Brazil, in the small provincial town of Lagarto. For his first ever English newspaper interview, he is charm personified: open, engaging and enthusiastic to talk, even when the conversation turns to Tuesday night and his stamp on Emre Can.
For now though we are on safer ground: a happy childhood, endless matches of street football and an upbringing which, it is hard to avoid concluding, has moulded the footballer and the man.
Jose Mourinho once described Lagarto as so remote that it was ‘beyond the sunset’. It stands at a crossroads of routes to even smaller towns, 180 miles north of Salvador. Still, it is Brazil, so football was the currency of the street and it was there that Costa, almost unwittingly, learned his trade.
‘In Brazil, if you have a son, the first thing you give him is a football,’ he says. ‘That’s the first gift, so my dad was no different. I grew up playing football on the streets with my friends and that’s why I was brought up the way I was. That’s the school I had — the street football.
‘Those football games were always in the afternoon and, as a kid, you always had the strength and energy to play for a long time, until you were very tired. Usually the games did last all afternoon and I became used to playing with guys who were older than me, so it was not only about playing football but also about being street-smart.
‘You had to not only be able to do all the tricks but be able to shield the ball, use your body. You had to know how to be able to play on the streets because they were different. We had our own rules over there and that’s the way it was in order to survive. What mattered was scoring goals and winning.’
It is an education far removed from the pristine football academies of western Europe. Costa was not even signed up by a professional club until he was 15 and even then it was in the fourth division of a regional Brazilian league. His was no gilded youth, though equally it was not an upbringing without discipline: his mother saw to that.
‘In order to be able to play football I had to behave, because every time my mum asked for something, I had to do it — then she would agree that I would be able to go and play football which is what I liked,’ he says. ‘So I had to get good grades in school, behave and do everything my mum wanted in order to be able to be free and play football.’
It was, however, tough. ‘I only played with players my age when I played on a school team or with a club when we played tournaments against other cities and stuff like that. But I was always a bit bigger than the rest of the kids so I have always enjoyed playing against older guys on the streets — two, three years older than me — because it was a better game for me. It was better to learn, to become better as well. It was a quicker game and I have always been strong.’
The laughter comes when he is asked how the games ended. ‘Most games ended up all right — but some of them didn’t! The worst thing was when I played against my brother, Jair. We could not play against each other because we always had a beef with each other. So we had to play on the same team.’
What you get with Costa is the raw, original South American footballer: no veneer and no gloss.
So to Tuesday night, a compelling semi-final against Liverpool and a clash with Can, when Costa pushed his foot down on the Liverpool player’s shin, a stamp which earned him a three-match ban and meant he missed out on Saturday night’s top-of-the-table clash with Manchester City.
He is speaking with us just a few minutes after the ban has been confirmed and he is keen to address the matter.
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