Real Madrid’s €140m signing Yan Diomande and his extraordinary rise from Spain’s fifth tier

When then-Leganes manager Borja Jimenez first heard about Yan Diomande, he was told they had found the next Lionel Messi.

Jimenez, who coached the Spanish club from 2023 to 2025, had heard that kind of thing before.

Club presidents often tell managers they have discovered a special talent, show them a few videos and wait for their reaction. That was the case in this instance, with Jimenez and former Leganes chief Jeff Luhnow.

But most young hopefuls never make it to the professional ranks, and if they do, they don’t come remotely close to emulating Messi, so Jimenez did not pay too much attention.

Then Diomande arrived.

On August 6 this year, Real Madrid signed Diomande from Bundesliga club RB Leipzig in a deal worth up to a club-record €140million (£120.2m; $189.3m) including add-ons. They saw off competition from Paris Saint-Germain and Liverpool to do so.

Yet just a year earlier, none of those clubs had noticed how he had begun to shine in La Liga’s lower reaches with Leganes, a small club to the south of Madrid, after being promoted from the team’s reserve side in Spain’s fifth tier. It has been a truly remarkable rise.

Diomande joined Leganes in January 2025 as a free agent. He had previously been part of DME Academy in the United States, an “elite sports academy and educational institution” in Daytona Beach, Florida.

He was just 18, did not speak Spanish and had never played professionally.

He had offers from MLS clubs. He also had trials at Bournemouth, Crystal Palace, Chelsea and Rangers, according to Txema Indias, who was Leganes’ sporting director at the time.

Indias liked what he saw, and Diomande joined Leganes’ reserve team, but injury and an issue with his paperwork meant he did not make an appearance until March 16 that year, coming off the bench in the 69th minute of a 1-0 home defeat by Cala Pozuelo.

The story was just getting started.

The following week, Diomande played the second half of a 3-0 win at Rayo Vallecano B. Coaching staff had seen enough — they quickly realised the winger had to be promoted.

Six days later, on March 29, he made his La Liga debut for the first team — at the Santiago Bernabeu, in a 3-2 defeat by Real Madrid that finished at around 10pm.

It sounds like an incredible situation to be in. Jimenez says Diomande was totally unfazed.

De pedirle una camiseta a jugar con él.

Yan Diomande 🤝 @KMbappe

LALIGATransfers | @realmadrid pic.twitter.com/mcZJNUCbGW

— LALIGA (@LaLiga) August 14, 2026

“He wasn’t nervous, he just seemed to recognise that he was better than many footballers,” the manager says. “He went out there and enjoyed it. For players like that, these occasions are not extraordinary. It comes naturally to them.”

The very next day, Diomande played 90 minutes for the reserves in an 11.30am kick-off — but for the rest of the season he would now be with the first team. Jimenez wasn’t having it any other way — even if he knew he was dealing with a raw talent that needed shaping.

“We had to teach him tactical concepts that would help him make better decisions,” Jimenez says. “He was missing a lot of ideas around positioning and offensive and defensive movements.

“But he had no insecurities and no fear. He was very humble, always the last one to leave training and the one who collected the balls afterwards. He had an overwhelming personality.”

Leganes played with three centre-backs, giving Diomande the entire flank to himself. He had to learn when to run, when to stay, how to defend and when to attack. The coaching staff worked with him individually almost every day. Jimenez says Diomande’s personality made that easier and that he competed naturally.

But there was a moment that could easily have changed his story.

With four games left in the season, Diomande missed a late chance against Sevilla. He was heavily criticised afterwards.

“To me it wasn’t a missed goal because he was the only person capable of creating that chance,” Jimenez recalls.

“People criticised him heavily. But the criticism didn’t affect him. He was above all of that, like the superstars. Seven days later, he forced two yellow cards, scored a goal (his first in senior football) and destroyed Espanyol in 45 minutes. We were 2-0 up at half-time (in what turned into a 3-2 victory).”

Midfielder Seydouba Cisse, now 25 and at Saudi Arabian club Al Kholood, a Guinea international, was one of the players who helped Diomande adapt at Leganes. He had heard about the young Ivorian’s talents. It didn’t prepare him for what he saw.

“He was incredible,” Cisse says. “One thing I had never seen in a player, in person or on TV, was how comfortable he is with both feet. You cannot tell if he is right-footed or left-footed.

“He would take the ball and go past everyone from one end of the pitch to the other in our small-sided training games.”

Soon, Cisse became more than a team-mate.

Cisse would take Diomande out of the training ground, where he was spending most of his time, and show him around Madrid. He would take him out for dinner and, on occasion, let him sleep at his home. Diomande started calling him “father”.

Indias recalls that Diomande’s only real weakness was that he did not yet understand professional habits.

“If training started at 10am, the players had to arrive at 9am to do their injury-prevention exercises,” he says. “He lived 10 metres away, but would sometimes turn up at 9:30.”

When Indias asked him what he was doing, Diomande did not make excuses.

“He simply did not yet understand the importance of those details,” Indias says.

Meanwhile, much more important things were happening in his life.

During those months at Leganes, Diomande’s sister died. It happened quietly. He did not talk about it. His team-mates and Cisse were among those who knew what happened, while the club tried to help him.

“From a human point of view, football does not matter at all,” Indias says. “He never openly expressed his emotions about it.”

Diomande stayed in Madrid. None of his family came to visit him. He did not ask the club to go home, either.

He continued to go from strength to strength on the pitch. He scored one more goal for Leganes that term, in a 3-0 win against Real Valladolid on the final day. Despite the victory, they were still relegated to Spain’s second division, but the strike was nominated for the club’s goal of the year award for 2025.

Regates con la derecha y definición perfecta con la izquierda.

Este gol de Yan Diomande en el #LeganésRealValladolid es nuestro segundo candidato a mejor gol del año.

Vota por él aquí pic.twitter.com/HVSMEc34ne

— C.D. Leganés (@CDLeganes) December 27, 2025

Others were taking notice. Diomande had only played 10 league matches for Leganes but RB Leipzig were ready to act.

“When they first called me, they did not ask me anything about what he was like as a footballer,” Indias recalls. “Leipzig wanted to know what he was like as a person.”

Leipzig met his €20million release clause. It was a joint record sale for Leganes — matching the fee Sevilla paid them for Morocco striker Youssef En-Nesyri in 2020.

“Do you think a Spanish club would pay €20million for an 18-year-old boy they had barely seen?” Indias asks. “For an English or German club, it is different. They are not as afraid to make that kind of investment.”

For Leganes, there was a mixture of pride and disbelief. Smartly, they inserted a clause into their deal with Leipzig entitling them to five per cent of any profit from a future sale.

Jimenez still wonders what might have happened if Diomande had arrived earlier.

“I have always said that if he had started playing for us in January we would have qualified for Europe,” he says.

Perhaps that is the strangest part of the whole story. Leganes knew they had a special player. They did not know just how special he would turn out to be.

“Nobody realised,” Jimenez says. “Now, people are surprised.”

When Diomande made his debut against Real Madrid, Cisse told him: “Vinicius (Junior) is not faster than you. (Kylian) Mbappe is not faster than you.”

Diomande’s response was simple: “If you have the ball, give it to me.”

That is what Cisse did.

“From that moment, every time I got the ball: bang, bang, bang, straight to Yan,” he says.

Just over a year later, Diomande had starred in a true breakout season in the Bundesliga, scoring 13 goals and providing 10 assists in 36 games. This summer he appeared in all four of Ivory Coast’s World Cup games as they were eliminated in the quarter-finals by Norway.

Indias watched him. He could barely connect the player he was seeing with the teenager who had been living at Leganes’ training ground.

“The boy never hid from the moment,” he says. “You saw him playing at the World Cup and you thought: he was with us just yesterday.

“He never hid. It was incredible.”