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Football

14th Jan 2017

Diego Costa shows feelings on Instagram but no-one can believe he’d want Chinese money instead of English

Why are people so surprised?

Conan Doherty

Don’t go for the money.

All you care about is the money.

Do you not love your club?

What happened to the joy of just kicking a ball?

Chelsea fans, and Premier League fans in general, seem to be forgetting a couple of things right now.

  1. Diego Costa is from Lagarto in Brazil.
  2. Chelsea wouldn’t have signed or attracted a player like Diego Costa if it wasn’t for Russian money.

Diego Costa is only living in London because someone happens to be paying him a shit load of money to do so. Chelsea only happen to be one of the best teams in the world because someone happened to pump a shit load of money into making the club one of the best teams in the world.

Playing in England is as arbitrary to a South American as playing in China would be. Yes, the Premier League is better right now and there are more eyes on it and it, in a very abstract way, means more to win in England than it would the Chinese Super League at present. But only because money came into the game to make it better in England.

A shit load of money.

Why else would foreign footballers show up in Middelsbrough or Bradford or Portsmouth?

But the talk is that Chelsea’s striker is on the brink of an exit from Stamford Bridge and, if Sky Sports is anything to be believed, there are a number of factors adding up that spells China:

  • He hasn’t trained in three days.
  • He had a training ground row with fitness coach Julio Tous.
  • He’s been dropped from the Chelsea match day squad for the Leicester clash.
  • His agent Jorge Mendes is currently in China.

You put those together and it amounts to 300,000 quid a week.

But, still, Diego Costa has seemingly remained loyal to the Blues. So far.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BPOKvO4g0sV/

And plenty of Chelsea fans can’t see why not. After all, once a Blue, always a Blue. In his eighth senior club in his 28-year life, Diego Costa must surely have found home in this one.

That’s what the responses to his Instagram suggest anyway.

You can only love football in England.

Stick with your roots, Diego.

Does family mean nothing anymore?

At least someone understands the logic.

But maybe, just maybe, when Costa was born and raised and running around the streets of Lagarta, he always dreamed of a day he could honour the Chelsea crest in west London, in south east England, in the north west of Europe.

“They have a chance to become very rich, richer even than they would in European leagues and some consider this to be a problem,” Dion Fanning wrote on the topic.

“They are said to have abandoned the best years of their career to worship at the altar of greed.

“But perhaps that is what they believe the best years of their career are for. After all, these players left home a long time ago and they left home with the belief that football would allow them to achieve wealth for themselves and security for their families. 

“They are doing nothing different than those who turned up in various unheralded parts of England in the 1990s and tried to make sense of their surroundings while understanding their salaries easily enough. They are just doing it on a greater scale which is only to be expected when China is involved.”

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