Three years ago, Yan Diomande was playing fourth-tier amateur football in the United States. Now, at just 19, he has a €100million price tag on his head, and is being scouted extensively by Liverpool, Manchester United and Bayern Munich.

Diomande is one of the world’s most in-demand players heading into a summer where he will return to the States – the place he first burst onto the scene aged 15 – looking to play a starring role for his country at the World Cup.

If you speak to those who scouted, moulded and developed a shy young Ivorian into a Bundesliga record-breaker and a potential replacement for Mohamed Salah at Anfield, one attribute shines through.

‘He just keeps learning and adapting to circumstances – so that he can prepare himself for success,’ Todd Eason, a key figure in bringing Diomande to the US as a young teen, tells Daily Mail Sport.

Growing up in his neighbourhood of Sicogi, Abidjan, Diomande could not afford football boots. His mother suffered a number of health problems and his dad wasn’t in the picture.

By the time he made the decision to move away to join an academy, he was so shy and introverted that he broke down in tears when it came to singing or dancing an initiation song. He simply couldn’t do it. But Diomande left home fixated on becoming a professional. Not just in his own country but a star at one of the world’s biggest teams.

It was his performances at the Under-17 Africa Cup of Nations, a tournament always teeming with scouts, that brought him to the Florida sun.

‘We felt like this was a player that we needed to bring over,’ explains Eason, then director of the DME Academy, a private institution based in Daytona Beach. ‘There were a lot of people already looking at him. But I think it was our approach to get him out of Africa so that he could get even greater exposure with European clubs (that persuaded him to join). We were lucky to have him.’

Diomande, then only 15, made the move alone from Abidjan to Florida despite not speaking a word of English (he would later pick it up through Duolingo). And the roadblocks kept coming. In his first game for DME, Diomande became a target for opponents who wanted to rough him up. He was sent off for retaliating, unable to control his emotions.

‘Adjusting to the game here was tough, because he ended up being a target and a lot of the teams we played just went after him,’ Eason adds. ‘He would always retaliate and didn't understand how to control his emotions. He was kind of reckless at first and then settled down.’

The tricky winger soon realised he wasn’t going to get the fouls he thought he deserved. He had to toughen up quick.

‘That was one of the things we changed from day one,’ says Eason. ‘When he would get barely touched, he would flop and fall down and whine and cry and I just never had patience for it.

‘He saw that and just stopped doing it. There had been plenty of times he got knocked down early on and would stay on the ground whining, but I just wouldn't tolerate it. He knew that and he wasn't getting calls anyway, so he changed that and said, “I can't get away with this - let's move on to the next thing”.

‘That's one thing he learned here, that sometimes life can be unfair. And he's OK with that.’

Diomande was quick, unselfish, an elite finisher, quiet off the pitch but finding a swagger on it. And no matter the difficulty of DME's opponents, he was always the best player on the pitch.

En route to an undefeated season in 2022 where Diomande was the best player, Eason organised games against professional teams purely to see how the youngster would fare in sink-or-swim situations.

Diomande’s name was well known in the high school circuit by this point and Eason needed another level to test him at, this time loaning him to DME's affiliate side, fourth-tier AS Frenzi. It became immediately apparent that this 16-year-old was a cut above.

‘We had everybody else try to facilitate him,’ team owner Wayne Dorman tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘You’ve got to feed him the ball and we learned that from when we had him. Just give him the ball.

‘Later on in the season, he was playing pros and he would get like three or four guys on him because they knew who he was.’

Diomande was the name on everybody’s lips. By the time he first went viral, generating more than 1.5million views after 'assisting' himself by playing a pass through the lines, racing on to it to then rounding the goalkeeper to score in a 7-1 win over Tennessee Tempo in July, 2023, kids had long started lining up for Diomande’s autograph.

‘We didn't know he was so popular!’ says Dorman. ‘All the kids came up to the guy and he was just cool about it. He was like, “Yeah, I'll take a picture”. He didn't have a problem. When I saw the aura he had in that moment, I felt he could one day be a leader for his country.

‘Football will get him to a point where he'll be at the top of the list, No 1. But once that’s over, I think there's still a lot more for this guy to achieve in life.’

The Frenzi secondment had been an overwhelming success. He was named STARI Player of the Year - picked out from over 5,000 players - and trial offers flooded in.

Bournemouth, Chelsea, Crystal Palace and Rangers were all immediately keen. Multiple MLS clubs had a look but decided against offering terms, to the surprise of Eason.

A move to Rangers was foiled due to agent demands, while the player chose La Liga side Leganes over Chelsea due to concerns over his playing time in England, despite not speaking any Spanish and having to navigate the emotions around the sudden passing of his sister.

By now he was extremely resilient, not to mention a fast learner. Just a month after joining Leganes’ reserve team, with Duolingo back in overdrive, he made his professional debut away to Real Madrid and never looked back, pitching up at RB Leipzig within six months in a £17.5m move.

Diomande wasted no time in becoming a star in Germany, with his treble in a 6-0 win over Eintracht Frankfurt last December making him the second-youngest player in Bundesliga history to score a hat-trick.

What both Eason and Dorman did express during our chats was concerns about those helping Diomande navigate his career.

It was Maxidel Management that took him from Leganes to RB Leipzig but earlier this year, Roc Nation announced they were representing him. That was followed up by Maxidel Management insisting it is they who continue to manage the young Ivorian, a complicated situation which needs a resolution ahead of a potentially lucrative summer window.

Liverpool are seeking a quick, versatile forward as part of their post-Salah rebuild, while United are keen on adding a left-sided player as they pivot back to a system that relies on wing play. Liverpool feel their strong relationship with the Red Bull group, who are still determined to convince Diomande to sign a bumper new deal, gives them the edge.

And whoever does secure his services may need to get in quick before the World Cup. Diomande has three goals in his first nine caps for the Ivory Coast, and will look to showcase his talents this summer against Germany, Ecuador and Curacao in Group E. Play a starring role in leading the Elephants to the knockout stages for the first time and that €100m (£87.3m) price tag will sky-rocket.

But Dorman has a word of warning for any of his summer suitors. ‘He can't just be a guy,’ he explains. ‘Liverpool have got a lot of talented players. But you can't make Yan be the third option. Leipzig use him right now where he's the first option and if he's not scoring, he's creating. They use him correctly.’

Eason, a father figure who still calls Diomande once a month to ‘keep him grounded’, is adamant that the best is yet to come from the 19-year-old.

‘I don't know what his true level is, what his true ceiling is, and that's what's so exciting - he always steps up to the level and goes beyond it,’ he says. 

'There hasn't been a level so far that I've seen where he is just an average player for the league. He just keeps excelling. That's the scary thing about this kid - we still don't know what his potential is.’