The tragedy of Diogo Jota and Rute Cardoso: Wedding and widowhood in just 10 days

On a day when Portugal was focused on the trial of the century, with a former prime minister in the dock accused of corruption, the country was rocked instead by one of those fatalities for which no one is ready. Least of all Rute Cardoso, the woman who married Diogo Jota on Sunday, June 22, in Porto and became his widow 10 days later.

They were newlyweds, but they’d had a long relationship and three children together. It was one of those stories that started in high school as if by chance, and survived against all odds, including the whims of adolescence. Diogo Jota and Rute Cardoso were classmates at a high school in Gondomar, a small city of 25,000 inhabitants in the north of the country. Cardoso had just arrived from another town and joined Diogo Jota’s class. She was one of those students who got top grades with little effort. “I managed to get good grades, but without having to study hard,” she recalled in 2016, in an interview with Correio da Manhã.

At 19, they moved together to Madrid, where the footballer began his international career with Atlético de Madrid. It was a brief stay, as he only completed pre-season training and was loaned out before even making his debut to Porto, where he spent the 2016-2017 season and scored nine goals. Atlético played more of a financial than sporting game with Diogo Jota, and the following year the Spanish team loaned him back to Wolverhampton, the English club where his talent would blossom and where he would catch the attention of Liverpool.

He was in fact returning to Liverpool with his brother Andre Silva, also a soccer player, when his Lamborghini caught fire while traveling at high speed on the A-52 highway near Cernadilla (Zamora), after a tire blowout. The athletes had decided to travel by car rather than by plane on medical advice. The Liverpool player had undergone surgery for a lung injury, and the recommended protocol advises against flying to avoid risks related to blood pressure changes. Their plan, according to Record, was to travel by car to the northern Spanish city of Santander and take a ferry to Portsmouth (England), where they would again drive the remaining 267 miles (430 km) to Liverpool, with the aim of preparing for the pre-season, which begins on Tuesday.

The accident cut everything short: the plans for Anfield and the plans of Rute Cardoso. The tragedy became a collective one. In Portugal, everyone from the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, down to the neighbor of the players’ grandparents, have expressed shock and grief. Rebelo de Sousa, who is traveling to Cape Verde this Friday to observe the 50th anniversary of independence from Portugal, is willing to speed up his return if the funeral ceremony finally takes place on Sunday as planned, to express public gratitude for “all the joys” and “the commitment” of these years. The president praised the player’s profound “humility.”

In Gondomar, where Diogo Jota lived, played, and met Rute Cardoso, a day of official mourning has been declared for his death and that of his brother. In 2022, he opened a football academy at the Gondomar Sport Clube that bears his name. A quote of his was chosen for the inauguration ceremony: “It’s not important where we come from, it’s important where we’re going.”

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