Liverpool forward Diogo Jota rose to the heights of soccer stardom before his tragic death at 28

As a child, Diogo Jota idolized Cristiano Ronaldo. In a career that took him to the heights of soccer stardom, he would go on to call the Portugal great a teammate and win some of the sport's biggest trophies.

Jota, the Liverpool forward who in May celebrated winning the Premier League title, has died. He was 28.

Police said Jota died along with his brother Andre Silva, also a soccer player, in a car accident near the northwestern city of Zamora, Spain.

He had just completed the most successful season of his career — helping Liverpool to a record-equaling 20th English league title and then winning the UEFA Nations League with Portugal alongside Ronaldo.

“Doesn’t make any sense. Just now we were together in the National Team,” Ronaldo posted on social media.

Diogo Jose Teixeira Da Silva was born Dec. 4, 1996 in Porto, Portugal.

A clinical goal-scorer, his talent took him from humble beginnings with his local team Gondomar to soccer’s biggest stages with Liverpool and Portugal.

As a child he dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player. But his route to the top was not straightforward — having to prove himself at lower levels and facing setbacks before securing a move to Liverpool in 2020. He went on to win English soccer's three major trophies during his time at Anfield.

“I was still paying to play football when I was 16 years old,” Jota said in a discussion at Web Summit in 2020.

His passion for soccer was developed at an early age. As a boy he would cry while pleading with his father to let him play rather than attend swimming classes that clashed with practice sessions.

From Gondomar he joined unheralded Portuguese team Paços de Ferreira before a move to Spanish giant Atletico Madrid looked like being his big break.

In a way it was, but the transfer did not work out as expected.

Jota never played a competitive match for Atletico but was sent on loan to Porto and then Wolverhampton Wanderers, where he would make his mark in England and eventually earn the attention of Liverpool.

Wolves was a second-tier team when Jota arrived on a season-long loan in 2017 and reunited with Nuno Espirito Santo, who coached him during his stint at Porto the previous season.

Jota had clearly made an impression on Nuno — scoring nine goals at Porto — and he repaid the coach's faith by doubling that figure as Wolves topped the Championship and won promotion to the Premier League in his first year.

The goals kept coming. Ten after making the step up to England's top flight — the most popular league in the world — and 16 the season after.

Soon Liverpool, which had just won the title, came calling.

Jota said it was “impossible to say no” to the move worth 41 million pounds ($56 million).

“All of my path since I was a kid and now, to join a club like Liverpool — the world champions — is just unbelievable," he said.

Manager Jurgen Klopp accepted the then-23-year-old Jota was “far away from being kind of a finished article” but had “so much potential.”

With an established forward line of Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino in front of him, Jota had his work cut out just to get playing time in the 2020-21 season.

But Klopp told him what was expected now that he was on the big stage at Anfield.

“He was clear. I was there to challenge the front three not to be happy with being a substitute player who comes on,” Jota said in an interview with Sky Sports. ”Playing with the best makes you better so I knew that I would increase my level as well and that would help me get into the team."

He certainly did that.

He made an almost immediate impression — scoring eight minutes after coming on for his Premier League debut for Liverpool in a 3-1 win over Arsenal. There was a hat trick at Atalanta in the Champions League and further goals against other big rivals like Manchester United.

A total of 13 goals in his first season was a solid return — even if Liverpool surrendered its title.

He bettered that with 21 the following year as Liverpool won the FA Cup and English League Cup and finished runner-up in the Premier League and Champions League.

The Premier League title eventually came last season and Jota's winning goal against Everton in April — his last for the club — was a crucial one in pushing Liverpool toward the trophy.

In all, Jota scored 65 goals in 182 games for Liverpool.

He followed the Premier League title with triumph in the Nations League with Ronaldo in June — the second time he won the trophy, having previously lifted it in 2019. He was capped 49 times by his country and scored 14 goals.

After the Nations League final, he posed for photos on the field, beaming proudly as he held the trophy.

“Just three weeks ago, I had the honor of presenting Diogo Jota with a medal after the UEFA Nations League final — a moment of joy, pride, and celebration that will now forever be burned in memory with sorrow," UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin said. “His passion, energy and spirit on the field inspired everyone around him. It is devastating to think that a life so full of joy and potential has been taken far too soon.”

To add to a momentous few weeks, Jota also recently got married to his long-term partner and mother of their three children, Rute Cardoso in a ceremony on June 22.

“Yes to forever,” his wife wrote in a social media post along with pictures from their wedding day.

Klopp said he was “heartbroken."

“There must be a bigger purpose! But I can’t see it!,” he posted on social media. "Diogo was not only a fantastic player, but also a great friend, a loving and caring husband and father!

“We will miss you so much!”

James Robson is at https://twitter.com/jamesalanrobson

AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

FILE - Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo, left, celebrates with his teammate Diogo Jota after he scored his side's second goal during the Euro 2020 group B qualifying soccer match between Luxembourg and Portugal at the Josy Barthel stadium in Luxembourg, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2019. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File)

Tributes at Anfield Stadium, home of Liverpool, in memory of Liverpool player Diogo Jota, Thursday July 3, 2025. (Peter Byrne/PA via AP)

FILE - Liverpool's Diogo Jota walks the pitch with his family after the Premier League match at Anfield, Liverpool, Sunday May 22, 2022. (Peter Byrne/PA via AP, File)

FILE - Liverpool's Diogo Jota celebrates scoring during the Premier League match at Carrow Road, Norwich, Saturday Aug. 14, 2021. (Joe Giddens/PA via AP, File)

FILE - Liverpool's Diogo Jota attends a press conference at Anfield, Liverpool, England, Monday March 10, 2025, a day ahead of their Champions League round of 16 match against PSG. (Peter Byrne/PA via AP, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)