Before Yan Diomande had kicked a ball for CD Leganés' first team, the club's owner was already telling people he had unearthed the next Lionel Messi. Borja Jiménez, the coach who took Leganés into La Liga and later into the Bernabéu on the night Diomande would debut, has now told the story in detail — and ONE picked it up this week under the headline that gives away the punchline: "We have the new Messi."

According to Jiménez's account, Leganés owner Jeff Luhnow — the American businessman better known in the US for his years running the Houston Astros — pulled up a YouTube clip on his phone and showed it to his coach. It was grainy home footage of a 16-year-old Diomande playing for a boys' academy team in the United States. Luhnow's verdict, as Jiménez remembers it, was blunt: "We have the new Messi."

Diomande, an Ivorian winger, had been training with Leganés' academy set-up but was nowhere near the first-team picture when Jiménez first laid eyes on him in the flesh — by his own telling, barely a week before Leganés were due to travel to face Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu in March 2025. Jiménez threw him into that squad anyway.

The teenager's senior debut came in Madrid, in front of the club he would eventually be linked with buying him. Jiménez has described the instant impact: in Diomande's very first involvement he raced down the wing, beat two defenders and nearly won a penalty. Leganés were relegated from La Liga that season regardless, but Jiménez has since said he believes an earlier introduction for Diomande — rather than a late-season cameo — might have been enough to drag the club to safety.

What happened next moved fast even by modern transfer-market standards. In the summer of 2024, Leganés sold Diomande to RB Leipzig for a reported €20 million, a fee that looked full value at the time for a player who had barely established himself. Leganés reportedly kept a resale clause worth somewhere between five and eight percent of any future transfer, a detail that is about to look extremely shrewd.

Just over a year later, Real Madrid have agreed a deal to sign Diomande from Leipzig. Fabrizio Romano and multiple outlets in Spain, Germany and England reported this week that the two clubs have struck an agreement worth well in excess of €100 million, with figures cited ranging from a fixed fee near €120 million to a package — including add-ons — closer to €135 million. Neither club had confirmed final terms at the time of writing.

Whichever number lands, the trajectory is staggering: a player sold for €20 million barely twelve months ago is now being valued at five to seven times that figure. Jiménez himself predicted the leap, telling Spanish media he expected Diomande's value to "double or triple" within a year or two of leaving Leganés — a forecast that has already been comfortably exceeded.

Diomande, born on 14 November 2006, made his mark in his single season at Leipzig and has also become a fixture for Ivory Coast at international level. Real Madrid, under Jose Mourinho, are said to be closing in on completing the paperwork before the squad departs for their pre-season training camp in Austria, with an official announcement expected imminently.

For Leganés, the deal is a bittersweet footnote — vindication for the recruitment call Luhnow made on nothing more than a phone video, and a reminder of how far a lower-table Spanish club's discovery can travel once a giant like Real Madrid decides it wants in.