One is from where he plays football

Assane Diao (Ndongane, Senegal, 2005) is fulfilling a dream. But it is neither his alone nor pursued alone for him: every time he takes the field, the Betic player does so with his mind set on his family, on the history of sacrifice that has brought him to the place where he is today. He made his debut in LALIGA EA SPORTS at the age of 18 (and scoring a goal!), and played with the youth teams of the Spanish national team. It is enough to listen to him speak for a while to agree with former player and DAZN commentator Alberto Edjogo (Sabadell, 1984): Diao is an extraordinarily responsible and mature young man. Both Edjogo and Diao live parallel lives, and precisely those common themes are those that emerge during the conversation in this episode of the LALIGA VS video podcast series: the values ​​that your origin imprints on you, the importance of the sense of belonging and football as an element of integration.

Mossa, Assane’s father, arrived in Spain in 1996 crossing Libya, Tunisia and Morocco and settled in Badajoz to work as a sheet metal worker. Assane and his twin brother arrived in Spain at the age of three when the Diao family, after many efforts, managed to reunite.

Alberto Edjogo’s father comes from Equatorial Guinea, he came in the seventies fleeing a dictatorship. In both of them, their families have instilled in them the need for effort as a non-negotiable value. But there is something that unites them even a little more: football. The three Edjogo brothers played. Alberto became an international for Equatorial Guinea. Exactly the same as the four children of the Diao family. “I am a very shy boy, it is difficult for me to adapt to a new environment. And all or almost all of my friendships come from football. It has been like this since my childhood: I remember all of us brothers with a ball since we were two years old.” To which Edjogo responds: “That is the integrating power of football: around a ball the differences do not matter.”

Diao confesses that he feels a special weakness for his little brother, Omar: “I love spending time with him and watching his games.” From his profession, from football, he wants to be a reference to make the world a better place. An inspiration for the youngest: “I want them to see not only a good footballer, but a good person.” A commitment that, in fact, takes us further. He is studying Teaching: “Because I want to be able to instill values ​​in future generations, open their minds and change things for the better.”

His dazzling rise, the way in which he went from being a youth player to shining alongside stars like Nabil Fekir and Isco Alarcón at Real Betis, far from clouding his mind, has only strengthened his convictions: “without the effort of my team I wouldn’t have made it this far. That’s my advice for moments of doubt: surround yourself with your loved ones and trust in your work.” A player whose values ​​illuminate the future of the 13-bar club.

The Monitor for the Observation of Hate in Sports

LALIGA has developed a tool that independently monitors the conversation on social networks and audits the level of hatred and racism spread around Spanish professional football: one more step in its efforts to detect and eradicate violence and hate speech in football and in society. Every day and using a semantic engine with more than 50,000 linguistic rules and artificial intelligence algorithms, MOOD tracks up to 800,000 messages, calculating metrics that allow the fan to evaluate the progress of our football in this fight week by week.