Wolverhampton have become a little too self-aware of the joke and it’s great
Diego Costa is back in the Premier League all these years later
It has been a staggering five-plus years since the Spanish-Brazilian force left the English shores back to Spain and back to Brazil thereafter. Older, way less mobile, less physically imposing and less skillful in a practical sense, Diego Costa has returned. He has done so because Wolverhampton had it all figured out up until a freak injury of sorts derailed their whole plan. Now, desperate, not wanting to let the opportunity they feel they have created for themselves to be good and to penetrate the top-6 of the Premier League, they have gone all in. In the most Wolverhampton of ways, however.
This is a complicated club to understand – who they are, what they are and where do they stand in the world. They’re owned by Chinese businessmen in a world where their own national government, in very layman terms, has put a stop to investment in football clubs (examples such as Inter Milan or previously Aston Villa some of the most noteworthy). Then they have the weird figure of Super-Agent Jorge Mendes acting, even if from a distance and not in the day-to-day operations, as their de facto sporting director. He dips in, he dips out; it all ticks along in the meantime. But even so, the ebbs and flows not characteristically in sync with that of a football super project, of sporting world domination. Unlike Manchester City in the past or most recently Newcastle breaking the football transfer record for money spent in a calendar year, Wolves have been, within their peculiar-ness, very kind of normal. A mid-table Premier League club with aspirations. Modern day Stoke City. Except for one key, very visible and very funny thing: All those Portuguese players.
It's been so ridiculous, so anti-football wisdom, to be signing all these players, from this same country. “There’s no way that will work”, you’d think. Yet it has. Wolverhampton have been the one club that has flown next to Mendes and hasn’t anti-climatically crashed, like Monaco did or Valencia too. They’ve been the most stable, the most well-run, the smartest of the bunch. And still, the quintessential requirement in player recruitment is: você fala português? How this has worked this well and efficiently is still kinda strange to decipher, but the bottom line is that it has. They’ve been to the quarter finals of the Europa League, for crying out loud. The combination of signing a Champions League-caliber player when they were in the Championship in Rúben Neves and of prudent, selective, decisive transfer dealings after coming up to the Premier League has really been handled with pretty much mastery.
Furthermore, they’ve even known when to pull the plug and pivot, as things got stale with Nuno Espírito Santo. “He’s done such a good job, how are you going to sack him…”, was a vocalized line of thought when they made the change a year ago. But they saw the team get stuck and went for, obviously, another Portuguese manager. A man more fitting of being a philosophy professor giving lectures at the University of Coimbra – without the looks of a believable football coach, without the hate, bite and relentless pursuit of winning that someone like José Mourinho had in his aura. However, in Bruno Lage, Wolverhampton have a quietly tenacious, brilliant, cold-blooded football tactician that took a lackluster, past-its-prime group of players and took them to another mostly impeccable season performance. But even he knew he couldn’t keep squeezing this orange and expect to have juice for breakfast forever. It was at this point when we finally found out if Wolves were gonna keep this train rolling, if those Chinese monetary units would keep streaming into England’s Black Country region or not. The answer was yes, and the subsequent question was: “Uncle Jorge, are you there?”
Out went stalwarts of the Nuno years that Lage had made good with, such as defender Willy Boly and also defender but most importantly club captain Conor Coady. After Coady was preemptively replaced by another British/Irish Good Lad TM in Nathan Collins (Wolves: they like everyone Portuguese but central defenders English-speakers), in started to come all the best pickings Portugal had to offer not only it in its shores but across the globe – although by “across the globe” I mean Valencia, across the Iberian Peninsula. But “best pickings” wasn’t hyperbole. The next best thing after your Bernardo Silvas and your Bruno Fernandeses: Matheus Nunes, a midfielding phenom from Sporting Lisbon, and Gonçalo Guedes, an all-encompassing third-quarter-of-the-field attacker from Valencia. These guys might, just might, have Mendes fingerprints on them. But none more than the crown jewel, the unexpected man, the “break in case of emergency” guy, mister Diego Costa. That guy.
The funniest thing (well, not actually the funniest, that will come later with video unveilings filled with dogs) is that Wolverhampton had ventured out into the outside world. They broke from the reigns, from those threads of existence, that had kept them safe and sound in a metaphorical quaint Portuguese bakery eating “Pastéis de Nata”. They did so because if they were to build a Europe-contending team, they were going to do it properly. And apparently Mendes had everything on the rolodex except a Portuguese striker with whom to complete Lage’s team. So Wolves, with fresh Fosun Group cash to spend, went to Germany and brought back with them Austrian striker Sasa Kalajdzic, of Stuttgart. They might’ve still bought Nunes and Guedes, but maybe they were gonna put an end to the joke. Perhaps, the self-caricature, was ending. Not everything has to be Portuguese. A new day and a new dawn for Wolverhampton Wanderers. Or so they thought.
As an angry message from the Portuguese footballing gods, the sought-after Kalajdzic went down injured… only 45 goddamned minutes into his Wolves debut. A footballing strike of lightning. Wolves had strayed from the path, and they were notified that they had done so. If that’s not a sign of destiny, then what is. Their destiny is for the joke not to stop, to go on forever. So, as a present to the gods, and to the people, to our eager minds, they’ve ended up going bigger and unbeatable. Because they probably could’ve have pivoted and gone for some Rio Ave up-and-comer number 9 or some middling but with enough upside Sporting Braga forward. But the joke has now become self-aware. And it’s probably gone too far; scared of the celestial fury that signing Kalajdzic had brought upon them. It’s gone too far because he is, indeed, Diego Costa. Someone that knows a thing or two about going too far, am I right?
The best thing is that this is unbelievably funny because Costa is so far past his prime. He’s been without a club for the last 8 months, for god’s sake. The joke of “we only sign Portuguese/Portuguese-speakers” has definitely gone too far. But we are here for it. Just like we would’ve been, and even more so, for the alternative to the alternative. Costa’s acquiring almost fell through because of English football’s endless bureaucracy and not getting a work permit, since his recent numbers and “football status” didn’t qualify. But he’s a two-time Premier League champion after all. Something that Andy Freaking Carroll is not, but which wouldn’t have been any less insane of a wrinkle in this story, as apparently they wanted to sign him if the costa thing failed. Raúl Jiménez is a such a shell of his former self, they thought to themselves inside the club, that they needed to sign someone, anyone, even if it had to be Andy Carroll. Or maybe that was just a rumor. Or maybe it wasn’t, they sign him, and the earth under Molineux would have ripped open and some sort of satanic power would have punished them for, again, not signing another Portuguese speaker. Or maybe even the esoteric forces would have laughed too because Carroll would have been just too funny not.
Nevertheless, the UK work permit was pushed through, and Diego Costa had come back, baby. How all this is gonna work is tremendously puzzling. Once an elite striker, maybe at a point in time even the best number ‘9’ on the planet, those days are long gone. All those Cholo, Mourinho and Conte wars weigh heavy on the body of Costa. But this war is still going. That’s what we’re here for. For a guy like this, it will never stop being one. The hope, you would think, from Lage and Co. is for that war (Costa against every standing defender) to clear paths to goal for all of those extraordinary ballplayers that Wolves have in their second and third lines of attack. But it is still incredible. Albeit a Brasileirão winner in 2021 with Atlético Mineiro (who have been Brazlian champions only two times in their whole history), Costa has been “out of football” for eight months, team-less, prospect-less, solidly on the way out for good. But then they just reel him back in. The reign him back. And he ends up reigning wolf-like dogs in a hilarious but also mouth-dropping video presentation.
When all the other stuff didn’t seem like it could be topped, they film this. Because they are a little too self-conscious of the bit, of the joke – not only is this like the three hundredth “portuphile” player they’ve signed, but they also go and get a pack of a dogs so Diego Costa, wearing sandals and socks, can harness them and show the world that this team means business. “Those were wolves, not dogs. It was a cool experience but not a very comfortable one. I have five dogs, but they’re not wolves!”, declared Costa afterwards. I mean, this all so ridiculous – how could you not love it? The only sad outcome to this would be for him to get repeatedly injured throughout the season and all of it be for nothing. If they avoid that, whether the team implodes or gets into the top-6, the joke will hopefully have its ultimate climax. An over-the-top mix of Portuguese, Diego Costa, real life wolves and success. And I am completely here for it.