If you touch down in Lisbon International Airport, in the north of the Portuguese capital, and head a few kilometres west, you will reach the municipality of Odivelas. It is a land of hilltops and valleys, and home to around 150,000 of the more than two million people that call Greater Lisbon home.

Dario Essugo’s family are among them. Our midfielder was born in 2005 to Angolan parents who had moved to Portugal for a better life. Dario was their second son; his elder brother Danilo Luis, three years his senior, is also a footballer now, playing for Alverca B, a fourth-tier team in Lisbon.

It was in Odivelas that Essugo learned the ropes, on and off the pitch. Those formative years shaped the person and the player he has become.

‘Lisbon was a very nice place to grow up, but for me the most important thing is the people you are around, and how they make you feel,’ Dario tells us.

‘My parents helped me a lot because they are very strong mentally. I can see they struggled in the past and now they can live a little bit better, you know. But they helped me to see that life is not easy. And like all the people from Angola, they are very funny, and they smile and dance all the time!

‘My brother was like my inspiration. Sometimes we didn’t talk too much, but I could look at him and all he did, how hard he worked, always being positive, and put that to myself. We are still very close, and we talk every day.

‘When we were younger, I remember playing in my house and on the streets with him, and some other friends. We played a lot after school, in the summer too. They are nice memories. It was in school that I think I had the feeling that, okay, I’m good at playing football.’

Dario studied at schools in the vicinity, St Antonio and then Eugenio dos Santos, and won the best player award at the prestigious McDonald’s Tournament when he was nine.

By that point he was also representing a local club, UDR Santa Maria, and it was there that he caught the eye of some of the country’s biggest clubs.

‘I was ten when I joined Sporting,’ recalls Dario. ‘That was very nice, but I didn’t think too much of it because Benfica also wanted me. Sporting gave me a very good project for me and my family to go there, so I chose them.

‘It was very close to home, but my parents worked, and I needed someone to take me to training. At the beginning, Sporting went to my school to pick me up to go to training, but after, sometimes my family had to leave work a little bit early to pick me up.

‘My family were a very big support. This is the most important thing. If you have one person who believes in you it is so important. If I didn’t have my mother or my father to pick me up for training, and this kind of stuff, maybe I wouldn’t have gone at all. They put the effort in for me to one day be a football player. If I didn’t have them, maybe I wouldn’t be here.’

Dario’s development only accelerated under the tutelage of an academy renowned for bringing through some of the most talented players in the world: think Luis Figo, Cristiano Ronaldo and Bruno Fernandes.

He was a regular for Portugal at youth level, too, so there was no question Sporting would offer him a pro deal when the time came. It triggered one of the most thrilling periods in his young life.

‘That week was a little bit different,’ Dario says.

‘You have to be 16 years old for a professional contact in Portugal, and when I turned 16, Sporting wanted me, so that week – before my birthday – I started training with the first team.

‘Then I turned 16 and was offered the contract, starting my professional career. It was the end of that week that I made my Sporting debut. It was a very special week – a lot of emotions to live.

‘I think everyone that starts to play football always dreams that one day you will be there, where you saw all the players on the TV. You can’t explain how it feels in the moment, knowing one day you dreamed about that.’

Dario was yet to represent the club’s reserve or Under-23 sides, but Sporting held no fear thrusting him into the spotlight. Introduced as a late substitute in a 1-0 win over Vitoria de Guimaraes aged 16 years and six days old, Dario became Sporting’s youngest ever player – by a distance – and the youngest to ever feature in Portugal’s top flight.

At full-time, Essugo cried tears of joy at the emotion of his debut and a week to remember. He was embraced by all his team-mates, later telling the club’s TV channel of the ‘indescribable sensation’ and ‘pride’ he felt at making history with the club that had nurtured him.

Later that year, 2021, he became the youngest Sporting player to feature in the Champions League, and then the youngest to start a game. He accrued more playing time on loan at Chaves and Las Palmas before signing for Chelsea ahead of the Club World Cup last summer.

Injury might have restricted Essugo’s game time in blue thus far, but you can see why he lists hard work and mental strength as his biggest assets: they have helped him recover in time for the run-in this season.

And as he reflects on his journey so far, which aged 21 is still in its infancy, Dario has advice for anyone wishing to emulate it. They are words he has kept close to his heart.

‘Listen to the person who really cares about you, and be yourself,’ he says.

‘If you are not you, or if you try to be someone else, you can’t go anywhere. So be you, listen to your mind, what you feel, and what you want. Keep working, keep pushing and never give up, because life changes very quickly, so you never know.’

And while life may never be the same for that young boy from Odivelas, it has changed immeasurably for the better.