BLACKBURN, England -- From the outside looking in, the Ben Brereton Diaz story looks like a footballing fairytale. Once upon a time, there was a young striker from Stoke who was struggling to score goals, but something happened. He started scoring goals, a computer game apparently unearthed his Chilean ancestry, and eventually, he would make his international debut against Lionel Messi. Now he's one of the most famous people in Chile and the face of Pepsi. At the start of the season he was 1000-1 to score 20 league goals for Blackburn Rovers in the Championship. He's already got 13, and the clocks have only just gone back; betting companies in England are already paying out on him reaching the milestone. And all this, six years after he contemplated giving the game up, having been told for a second time he wasn't going to be good enough to be a professional footballer.
In Chile, the crowd chants "Brereton." At Blackburn, they cheer for "Diaz" and it's all a little bit...out there. But when you speak to him, you begin to learn how this explosion of form and fame isn't chance or footballing magic. It's down to logic and patterns as old as the game itself.
Brereton Diaz, 22, had already done a magazine shoot and spoken to a bunch of journalists from Chile by the time he sat down with ESPN. He's smiling away, willing himself not to fall back on cliches as he adjusts to this new boom of interest in his story. But unlike the narrative that's followed Brereton Diaz, there is no one single eureka moment in this tale, but a series of contributing factors behind his three goals in eight appearances for Chile, and being the second top-scorer in the Championship behind Fulham's Aleksandar Mitrovic.
We're sitting in one of the box suites at Ewood Park, at the Blackburn end. It is a place inhabited by the ghosts of happy memories past: the faces of the 1994-95 Premier League-winning side are on a team photo outside the box. There are bits of memorabilia from their 2006-07 Europa League qualification match against Bayer Leverkusen along the hall, too, but after being relegated from England's top flight back in 2012, they've tried and failed to get back there.
Ewood Park is a place of endurance, too: Tony Mowbray is the longest-serving manager in the Championship, English soccer's second tier, while they have had to reinvent themselves every season thanks to bigger clubs coming for their best young talent. But still they push on, dreaming of future success and knowing effort will get them there.
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We're talking one day after Blackburn were hammered 7-0 by Fulham at home, their biggest-ever home defeat. "It's probably why it's so cold today," Brereton Diaz says. But four days later, they were back to winning ways, beating Sheffield United 3-1, with Brereton Diaz getting his 13th goal of the season.
"I was a long way off this a couple of years ago: I wasn't playing for the club, I wasn't putting in performances that I knew I could," he tells ESPN. "But then... last season I started a lot of games and scored a few goals, and then obviously on the back end of that, that took me into the Chile stuff and then after that, I've built up a lot of confidence.
"I feel great, and it's been good ... I've come back with a lot more confidence this season."
To realise how remarkable his current form is, we need to head back six years. Brereton Diaz (then just Ben Brereton) had been shown the door by Stoke City, who turned down the chance to offer him a contract two years after he left Manchester United's youth academy.
"I was at United at a young age and you don't really know what's going on. When I was at Stoke and I was a [student] and then... I was like, 'do I want to go through this again?'"
Nottingham Forest saw his potential and swooped in. There the young striker -- very much a classic No.9 told to linger around goal, unlike the versatile forward he is in 2021 -- started fulfilling his potential. "They were brilliant to me and helped me to get Forest's first team." He was prolific in the academy, and his form for the first-team caught Blackburn's eye. In August 2018, they brought him in on loan, and by January, paid in the region of £6m to secure him on a permanent deal.
Still only 18 at the time, the expectations associated with his transfer fee weighed heavy on his shoulders as he made a slow start at Blackburn, scoring just two Championship goals across the 2018-19 and 2019-20 seasons. "I was a young boy moving away from Forest to Blackburn, not really knowing too much," he says. "Even though in those two years I didn't play much, I still learnt a hell of a lot and definitely, over [time] you learn little bits and thankfully those little bits have helped me to get my game back to where it should be and where I need to keep it."
Midway through the 2019-20 season, the pandemic halted football, which gave him a chance to reset.
"That COVID break really helped me," he says. He focused on building up his upper-body strength and picked apart his game with his biggest critic and ally: his father, Martin. "We worked on my game -- he knows football, so he was pointing out what I was doing wrong and doing right, that's what I needed. Sometimes I do need a telling off, or whatever, and to keep going." When the action resumed, Brereton Diaz attacked the remainder of the season with renewed vigour, and his form improved. He took that into the 2020-21 campaign, started well, and it was around November that interest from Chile started becoming apparent.
The popular tale is that the video game series "Football Manager" played a role in this.
Back in October 2018, Brereton Diaz did an interview with the Blackburn Rovers matchday programme. It's an A-Z feature, and under "U for UNKNOWN," the question was: "Tell us something that people don't know about you" -- the answer was sandwiched between his love of Game of Thrones under TELEVISION, and how he played approximately five hours a day on his PS4 under VIDEO GAMES. "I'm half-Chilean," he answered. "My mum is from Chile and my dad is from England, so I am half-Chilean. The lads didn't believe me, but my mum came over to England when she was young and ended up with my dad. I suppose that means I'm eligible to play for Chile, right?"
It was true: The Diaz family moved to the UK and Stoke when Andrea was young, as her father (Ben's grandfather) was in the pottery trade. There, Andrea would later meet Ben's father, Martin -- a policeman and amateur football player -- and there's a whole Chilean community in Staffordshire. "From Santiago to Stoke," he says, laughing.
But that little nugget of information peaked Blackburn fan Mark Hitchen's interest. He is a researcher for Football Manager, the popular management sim, and having read the article, he verified Brereton Diaz's Chilean roots and had it added to the game's database as his "second nationality." This caught the attention of FM streamer Alvaro Perez, from Chile, who noticed this change when the FM21 beta version came out in Oct. 2020. He started a social media campaign "#BreretonALaRoja," which gathered traction.
Chilean flags started popping up on Brereton Diaz's Instagram, and eventually, the campaign caught the eye of Brereton Diaz's mum, Andrea, who kept her son informed on the family WhatsApp group. Around the same time, as the legend goes, Brereton Diaz's agent, Olly Henry, received a WhatsApp message from scout Ben Corbyn (son of ex-Labour leader Jeremy), who does some consulting for Chile saying they were monitoring the striker.
The notification came as Blackburn were preparing to visit their local rivals, Preston North End, in November, 2020. Brereton Diaz knew about the interest, and went on to score and assist a goal. Brereton Diaz had already represented England at youth levels, but as Chile's interest grew, it took him four months or so to acquire a Chilean passport. In May 2021, he was called up to the national side.
Now, how big a part Football Manager played in his call up depends on who you talk to. Those closest to Brereton Diaz are skeptical, pointing to how well he was playing and how Chile were monitoring him around the same time the social campaign was in full flow. But regardless, Brereton Diaz himself is appreciative of his supporter's efforts.
"I'm not always on Twitter, but yeah, I've heard the stories. I'm thankful for the people who made it clear I can play for Chile," he says. "When I was younger, [playing for Chile] wasn't really on my mind: I was in the England youth set-up [earlier in my career]. But when we got the call [from Chile], it was serious: now we've got to make a decision. What a great country, what a great team that won two Copa America titles... it was like, it's gonna be a brilliant experience to learn more about football and play with some great players. It was a no-brainer."