Some of the messages and uneducated posts on here by fully grown men are a fucking joke and some of you need to have a long hard look at yourselves and consider what you actually know about Diego.
I was a year above him at United and knew him from being 7 years old, right through to u18/reserves and was one of my best friends on the team and outside of football too.
He was known as an outstanding talent from being very very young and consistently played years above his age group. Not many at all do that, considering you're already a part of the best group of players from a 40 mile radius never mind to be able to play in the years ahead on a consistent basis too. I remember playing against Birmingham as a 2nd year scholar when he was a first year, he scored 4 in 2 games against them and all 4 were outside of the box, including an overhead kick. Every single team we played against knew who he was and knew exactly how good he was at that time.
I was in a changing room when Jamie Hoyland (excellent coach, wealth of experience and true blade) who was the u18 manager at the time described him as the best footballer he had ever seen in academy football, and nobody in that changing room doubted it and Jamie had coached at Preston for 10+ years before he came to us.
People saw him as this "big time charlie" or whatever people want to think about him when the truth was in training he was consistently one of the hardest working players we had, he had immense confidence in his own ability and thats perhaps why people see it as arrogance but anyone who played with him knew that it was the same confidence that enabled him to excel doing things other people couldn't.
United rejected approaches from Arsenal and Everton (1m) for a player that was head and shoulders above everyone else at his age group across the country at the time before doing his ACL when playing for Italy. He never quite managed to regain the same momentum he had before that injury but with his talent I'll always remember him as being one of the very very best to not "make it".
I don't think people should talk about him in a way that they do when he could've easily left for another club at the time but chose to stay at Sheff utd and work with Danny Wilson who would've had him playing every week.
Sometimes it just doesn't work out, it wasn't through his "attitude" or whatever people try and make up to justify abusing someone they have absolutely no idea about.
I can't be arsed to sift through some of the shit that some people are posting but seen his dad mentioned a few times, Kozzy was and is an absolute top man who kept him grounded and pushed him through to succeed. Sometimes it just doesn't work out, i don't see why fully grown men have to abuse a kid who wanted it just as bad as anyone else.
The club was a fucking mess from top to bottom at that time of him coming through, we had 3 u18 managers in 2 years along with however many first team managers. I'm just glad i wasn't at the club when funny little nigel came along after some of the things I heard about him.
