Diego Poyet had everything it took to be a promising player. 🇺🇾
He had played in the 2015 Under-20 World Cup in New Zealand, spent time at West Ham, and signed with Godoy Cruz in 2017. But there, in Argentina, football stopped being a refuge: foreign-player quotas kept him off the pitch and trapped with his own thoughts. He himself put it bluntly: they were “the worst eight or ten months” of his life.
To keep from sinking completely, he started training. At first it was just a way to fill the empty hours. “I started to like the gym”, he said, and that routine ended up being much more than exercise: it was the way he rebuilt himself on the inside while his body changed on the outside.
In 2018, he made a decision that even his own father never saw coming. He traveled to Bordeaux, stood before Gustavo Poyet—formerly of Chelsea and a leading figure in Uruguayan football—and told him that he no longer wanted to play professional football. He was only 24. For his family, as Gustavo himself acknowledged years later, it was a shock that people still talk about.
