Luis Díaz' roots: from humble beginnings to global stardom

Our Colombian winger Luis Díaz was a key player in our double victory, and now aims to shine at the World Cup too. Where did his journey to the top of the world begin?

In the tropical steppe of north-eastern Colombia, a perfectly manicured, lush green artificial turf pitch lies in the middle of the wasteland. Right now, 50 boys and girls are training. They’re all wearing good football boots, and there are plenty of balls and plastic cones. Welcome to the football academy operated by Fundación Luis Díaz, a charity foundation set up by our winger in his home country. In his home town of Barrancas, Luis Díaz has rolled out a green carpet.

“Playing on bare earth isn’t the same as playing on an artificial pitch that meets FIFA standards,” says 31-year-old Josher Brito Díaz, perhaps thinking back to the days when he used to dribble across the football pitches of Barrancas with his famous cousin Luis Fernando. Josher now runs the foundation, which employs not only football coaches but also a social worker. “All our children learn here what they can contribute to the community. Through football, we can improve community life,” says Josher.

Every day, 150 children across six age groups train at the new facility – and plans are in place to build a changing room block with showers in the near future. A few soccer mums are sitting on plastic chairs under one of the few trees. Today, heavy grey clouds hang over the bleak landscape, bringing a refreshing breeze to the otherwise stifling heat. Will it rain? “It never rains here,” says 17-year-old Daul. He’s been with the foundation from day one. He was there when they cleared stones from the first pitch with their bare hands. He likes Luis Díaz’s attitude, his positional play – “actually, everything,” says Daul, his eyes shining. “Lucho has developed his own playing style, which we all look up to: the feints in one-on-one situations, the speed and the patience.”

Daul hopes to make the leap into professional football from here. After all, Lucho’s father, Luis Manuel, drops by from time to time to scout for talent, according to the youth player.

School and football with dad at his side

Luis Manuel Díaz is a coach and a respected football expert in Colombia. “I’ve been running a football academy for 26 years, and that’s where Luis came from,” says “Mane”, as everyone calls him. “There were a few good players in Lucho’s age group. But none of the others made it into pro football.” Mane Díaz speaks with a father’s pride, not only of the tricks and feints he taught his son, but also of the trial sessions with top teams and their costly journeys. It’s all about time, dedication and love. For a great career, you need not only talent but also a strong family.

And anyone who knew the Díaz family during Luis’s childhood and teenage years will confirm this. Take Ana Beatriz Solano, who taught all four of Mane and Cilenis’s children during her 50 years as a primary school teacher in Barrancas. “Luis Fer was an angel!” gushes the 74-year-old at her old school, where there are now five fans hanging in every classroom. “You just had to keep a close eye on him to make sure he didn’t run off with a ball during lessons.”

Opposite the football pitch where Lucho once trained under his dad’s supervision, a cardboard cut-out of Luis Díaz stands in front of a house. It signals: Matchday! Today is the Champions League return leg between Bayern and Real Madrid, and of course his grandfather Luis – always known as “Luicho” – is watching the match featuring his grandson, who grew up in this house. The living room is simply furnished, with a bare lightbulb hanging in the room. A fan whirs. Trophies from regional football tournaments adorn the shelves, achievements earned by Lucho and other football-mad family members. Luicho has worked in agriculture all his life and is also a well-known local healer who treats snake and spider bites. Together with three of his eight children and a couple of grandchildren, he is now sitting in the garden under a broad tree canopy, their eyes glued to the television: after just one minute, Bayern are already a goal down.

Lucho’s number one hobby was always football. People in the local area were quick to recognise this exceptional talent at the Mane Díaz football academy. Luis also played for a select team from the nearby Cerrejón coal mine. Following a tournament in 2009 at the huge Metropolitano Stadium in Barranquilla, even national newspaper ‘El Heraldo’ devoted half a page to the ‘slender, fast and technically gifted’ Luis, then aged twelve. But talent scouts and youth academies were a long way off in Barrancas at the time – both geographically and financially. It was Papa Mane’s tireless efforts that repeatedly enabled Luis to showcase his footballing skills. As coach of the La Guajira provincial team, he took him to a tournament in the Colombian capital Bogotá, where they finished second. Later, he read on the website of the professional team Junior de Barranquilla about an open trial. As he says: “We absolutely had to go there.”

Off to the big city

Barranquilla is Colombia’s fourth-largest city and lies a six-hour drive from the Díaz family’s home. In this port city, situated at the mouth of the country’s longest river, there are a few modern neighbourhoods alongside many neglected and impoverished ones. The inequality is striking. Alongside the carnival – one of the largest in the world – the city is united by the football club Junior, nicknamed ‘the Shark’.

The club’s youth academy, known as “Bomboná”, is located far out in a barren suburb. In 2015, the now 18-year-old Luis from Barrancas arrived for a trial. He impressed immediately, but looked relatively thin and slight. “Talents like Luis don’t eat the way aspiring professional footballers should,” says Garcés. “We teach the young people here that too.” After Luis was accepted at Junior de Barranquilla, he was given a diet and training plan to help him build muscle strength.

The campus is home not only to Junior’s youth teams but also to those of its partner club, Barranquilla FC. And it was there that coach Melquisedec Navarro first deployed Luis Díaz in the U20s. Up until then, Lucho had always played as a number ten or a deep-lying striker. Then Navarro had a brainwave: “I thought: Let’s play him out wide so he can cut inside from there.”

It was a pivotal moment in Díaz’s development. Both youth coaches describe him as a down-to-earth, natural player who never lacked self-confidence or strength of character. Navarro recalls a youth final in his first season when “the new lad” initially sat on the bench. After falling 1-0 behind, he approached the coach himself to say: “Profe,” as all football coaches are affectionately addressed here, “put me on, I’ll sort this out.” And Lucho turned the game around in the closing stages – just as he did for Bayern against Real Madrid in 2026, watched by hundreds of millions of viewers .

Striking a balance between keeping your feet on the ground and being as ambitious as possible is a challenge that must be overcome in professional football. “He’s naturally a strong individual player. But here we’ve been able to teach him to improve his decision-making in team play,” says Navarro. And with success. Joshua Kimmich recently praised his “brutal decision-making” as well.

Football until long after dark

During his first few years in the big city, Lucho lived with his uncle Wilson in the Las Nieves neighbourhood. “It was a pretty rough neighbourhood,” Luis said in an interview with “51” after arriving in Munich. “Someone was mugged every few days; there were thefts and even murders.”

Luis missed his large family and small-town life in Barrancas, where everyone knows everyone else. But his host family helped him here too. To this day, his former host mother, Soiden, still lives in the same house on ‘Street 17B’, where the five-member patchwork family used to live. The walls are unplastered, and it is sweltering under the tin roof. The rooms have no doors, just curtains. Damp is rising up the walls. Many of the floor tiles are broken. “There wasn’t enough money to make ends meet. The journey to training was a long way, and I only had a few thousand pesos a day, so maybe one or two euros,” recalls Lucho. Papa Mane tried to send money from Barrancas, and Uncle Wilson drove him to training every morning on his motorbike. Lucho went to school in the evenings and then played football until late into the night with his host brother David, who was five years his junior, in the main square of Las Nieves, two streets away.

Just one year after Lucho had beaten hundreds of other players in the trial, he made his professional debut for Barranquilla FC. A few weeks later he scored his first goal; a few months after that, he was called up to the youth national team for the first time and was finally able to move into his own flat. He had found his place on the pitch and in football – and his career took off: today he scores for Bayern against Real Madrid and PSG, and for the Colombian national team against Brazil and Argentina. He is the talk of Barranquilla; his face is on the front pages of the daily newspapers and smiles down from oversized billboards. His journey has been a rocky one, from the small town of Barrancas in footballing no-man’s-land to Bayern’s Säbener Straße facility. But Lucho, the fighter, has overcome it all. And he is far from reaching his ultimate goal.

This is an abbreviated version of an article from FC Bayern magazine “51”