Three years ago, Yan Diomande was playing fourth-tier amateur football in the United States. Now, at just 19, he has a €100million price tag on his head, and is being scouted extensively by Liverpool, Manchester United and Bayern Munich.
Diomande is one of the world’s most in-demand players heading into a summer where he will return to the States – the place he first burst onto the scene aged 15 – looking to play a starring role for his country at the World Cup.
If you speak to those who scouted, moulded and developed a shy young Ivorian into a Bundesliga record-breaker and a potential replacement for Mohamed Salah at Anfield, one attribute shines through.
‘He just keeps learning and adapting to circumstances – so that he can prepare himself for success,’ Todd Eason, a key figure in bringing Diomande to the US as a young teen, tells Daily Mail Sport.
Growing up in his neighbourhood of Sicogi, Abidjan, Diomande could not afford football boots. His mother suffered a number of health problems and his dad wasn’t in the picture.
By the time he made the decision to move away to join an academy, he was so shy and introverted that he broke down in tears when it came to singing or dancing an initiation song. He simply couldn’t do it. But Diomande left home fixated on becoming a professional. Not just in his own country but a star at one of the world’s biggest teams.
Yan Diomande is one of the world’s most in-demand players heading into a summer where he will return to the United States looking to play a starring role for his country at the World Cup
If you speak to those who scouted, moulded and developed a shy young Ivorian into a Bundesliga record-breaker, one attribute shines through
It was his performances at the Under-17 Africa Cup of Nations, a tournament always teeming with scouts, that brought him to the Florida sun.
‘We felt like this was a player that we needed to bring over,’ explains Eason, then director of the DME Academy, a private institution based in Daytona Beach. ‘There were a lot of people already looking at him. But I think it was our approach to get him out of Africa so that he could get even greater exposure with European clubs (that persuaded him to join). We were lucky to have him.’
Diomande, then only 15, made the move alone from Abidjan to Florida despite not speaking a word of English (he would later pick it up through Duolingo). And the roadblocks kept coming. In his first game for DME, Diomande…