Last week, I scrolled past the headlines about Portuguese footballer Diogo Jota’s death, convinced it had to be a hoax. Impossible. He’d just scored. Just lifted the UEFA Nations League trophy with Portugal. Just got married. And now, just like that, gone?
It was real. Jota was 28 — a touch over a month older than me—had died. It was not a rumour. Just the truth, plain and brutal. A line in the news that shattered an illusion many Liverpool fans didn’t know they were holding onto: that there would always be a next match, a next goal, a next time.
If you don’t watch the beautiful game, you may not know Jota. He was no global icon, not the poster boy of a brand or the face of a World Cup. But to Liverpool supporters, he was the quiet metronome: ghosting into the box, delivering late goals, knitting moments of brilliance with understated regularity. He didn’t shout for attention. He simply showed up.
That was the rhythm we came to believe in. Football, like much of modern life, thrives on rituals: game weeks, seasons, and transfer windows. Continuity is not just a feature; it’s the premise of the game. And Jota, in his unflashy excellence, reinforced that premise. You could count on him.
But sport, like the world around it, is less permanent than it seems.
### **Randomness of change**
We’re living in an age that feels defined by continuity’s collapse. Not long ago, democracy in many countries was considered a durable framework: stable transitions, lasting norms, and institutional memory. Today, elections feel like episodes. The old guard gives way to those fluent in the algorithm. Headlines displace history. Disruption is no longer a blip; it is the operating system.
It’s tempting to think this is a Western problem, but Indians would disagree. Consider the slow erosion of constitutional restraint, the rise of personality over policy, and the increasingly brittle scaffolding of democratic discourse in the country.
Institutions built to last centuries now feel fragile, or worse, performative. Parliament sessions begin to resemble primetime panels. Civil services grope for autonomy amid shifting political winds. Trust in institutional memory is being replaced by loyalty to the moment.
The same dissonance applies to the economy. Growth narratives are told in smooth, upward curves, but the real stories arrive in jolts: one policy shock, one pandemic, one global rate cycle — and decades of presumed progress can stall. Ask a small trader who lived through demonetisation. Or a tech employee whose badge stopped working before the email arrived. We live as though we’re in charge. The shock is always in discovering we aren’t.
We have seen this pattern across public life. In 2006, [Pramod Mahajan](http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/05/03/india.politician/), a rising force within the BJP, was shot by his brother in a domestic dispute that stunned the political establishment. His death wasn’t just personal; it was institutional. Mahajan had become a link between the party’s ideological roots and its emerging technocratic face. With him, a certain roadmap disappeared.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assassination in 2022 was a shock, not because of its violence, but because of its context. The country’s longest-serving PM, still influencing policy behind the scenes, was shot mid-speech. No war. No political collapse. Just a summer campaign stop — and then nothing. For a country long seen as an anchor of stability, the randomness was the point. Even the most settled democracies aren’t immune to rupture.
We assume history moves forward — gradual, logical. But one stray act is often enough to derail the arc.
Even personal lives follow a version of this illusion. The CV tweaks, the scholarship essays, and the life plans saved to the Notes app on our smartphones. Stability, identity, a sense of belonging — all feel solid until they don’t. One policy change, one job loss, one MRI — and certainty is gone.
Sport reflects the same belief: that the structure will hold.
It might just be the most convincing liar of all. Clubs carry chants older than their players. Rebuilds and tactics are packaged like certainty. But football, like life, never follows the blueprint. The team sheet becomes its own kind of weekly reassurance. We cheer not just out of hope, but to pretend the ground beneath us won’t shift.
Until one day, it does.
_**Also read:** [Rank turners take away the fairness of Test cricket, make ordinary spinners extraordinary](https://theprint.in/opinion/rank-turners-take-away-the-fairness-of-test-cricket-make-ordinary-spinners-extraordinary/2340730/)_
### **Liverpool’s soul**
Jota’s death isn’t just a personal tragedy. It’s a crack in the story we tell ourselves — about the reliability of sport, and by extension, life. A car crash in northwestern Spain, alongside his younger brother, ended it without warning. That someone so familiar — part of our weekends, our group chats, the background hum of life — could disappear without a sign, is a reminder of how fragile even our most dependable rhythms really are.
He wasn’t a mythic figure. He was something rarer — not always on the pitch, yet somehow always part of the rhythm. The kind of player who didn’t just fit into Liverpool’s system — he fit into its soul: industrious, resilient, quietly decisive. He was, for many of us, part of how we made sense of the week.
And now, he’s gone.
This isn’t a eulogy. It’s a recognition that we live among systems built to feel permanent — and they rarely are. Democracies, markets, careers, and even fandoms are susceptible to rupture. And when those ruptures come, they don’t announce themselves with warning signs or arcs. They arrive like headlines. Sudden and final.
Jota will be remembered at Anfield. Flags will rise, silences will hold. But his real memorial is in the quiet disruption he leaves behind: the lineup that will never feature him again, the late goal that won’t come, the cheering that will now carry a hollow note.
Maybe that’s why we cheer like it’s forever. Because in a world where so little endures, we need to believe that something might.
Even if only for 90 minutes.
_The author is a vice president at a global investment firm in New York and a boyhood Liverpool supporter. He tweets @ak47who. Views are personal._
(Edited by Ratan Priya)