giornata, 7/10/25

Diogo Jota and Muhannad Fadl al-Lili

Giornata is my Thursday weekly media diary, covering whatever I read, watched, or listened to in the last week. Normally this is a paid feature, but this one is free. This week was spent mourning two football players.

I woke up to the news last Thursday that Diogo Jota, Liverpool forward, died in a car crash in Spain with his younger brother Andre Silva. I didn’t mention in it in last week’s giornata—I considered it immediately, but couldn’t think of anything to say that was meaningful either as part of a mourning process for myself, since I hadn’t yet wrapped my head around the loss, or a something felt worth reading to anyone else.

But I’ve spent the last week crying as Liverpool players posted their memories of him and the club shared footage of supporters in the city gathering to mourn him. I’ve grappled with empathy of seeing mourners at his funeral and distress over the fact that I am witnessing it at all. A month ago, Jota lifted the Premier League trophy with his teammates and less than two weeks before his death, Jota married his childhood sweetheart, Rute Cardoso, with whom he shared three children, including a newborn girl born in November. The last time many of the Liverpool players saw him were at celebrations, either of the season or of his marriage.

I’m the age now where I’m older than most professional athletes that I watch and I only have a few years more before it’s everyone. The gods made out of men are really gods made out of boys and they seem invincible in part because of their youth and how infinite potential is laid out in front of them and we get to watch them attempt to fulfil it.

When Jota was at his best, he was a clinical striker. The calls from fans when Liverpool were struggling to get over the line in a game were always “why not just bring Jota on?” because it felt like he surely would get a goal. The other thing he was notorious for was scoring when Liverpool was already up 2-1, transforming a tense game that could still end in a draw into potentially a dog walking. Obviously, this is not someone I know, but he’s someone I watched every week for four seasons and I’ve been thinking about the loss to his family and to his club a lot this week. Though I still don’t feel like I have anything revelatory to say here, his death will color a lot of how I engage with sports at least for the next year, if not forever. Losing a Premier League player this young, while they are in the midst of great success, is rare.

Over the weekend, Al-Maghazi Services Club announced the death of Muhannad Fadl al-Lili, a player for their club and the Palestinian National Team. He was killed last Thursday in an Israeli airstrike. Like Jota, al-Lili had a young child. Al-Lili’s wife was able to escape to Norway before attacks in Gaza amplified and al-Lili never got to meet his child.

The scales of responses are not surprising, but the sequence of events and witnessing the differences in the global football response to the death of Jota (appropriately massive) and the death of at least the 439th player in the Palestinian football community since October 2023 (hauntingly silent) was one of those moments that magnified my distress over the genocide in Gaza. For the all the rarity of losing an active Premier League player, the Palestinian football community has been decimated. Even al-Lili’s passing seemed to get more attention because his death came so close to another, much more famous, player’s. Journalist Leyla Hamed reports that six Palestinian football players were killed in the Gaza the first week in July.

I don’t know what it was like watch al-Lili play or interact with his teammates. I can’t speak to his style of play or even what position he was. Information is scant about his club that was based at Maghazi Refugee Camp, a camp that has existed since 1949. A few news aggregation sites have covered the news of his death originally posted on Al-Maghazi Services Club’s Facebook page. In most ways these tragedies don’t match up in their context outside the shared connection with football. But I’ve spent the week crying about two families who lost their father and I wanted to acknowledge them both, here where I write about what occupies my thoughts.

I’ll be back next week with some movies and romance novels.