Diego Luna’s unconventional route has led him to USMNT opportunity

Diego Luna hasn’t always gotten what he wanted. Professional athletes — especially those who are only 21 years of age, rarely do. But much like the Rolling Stones song, the Real Salt Lake midfielder has shown an uncanny ability to get what he needs.

This month, Luna is in training camp with the U.S. men’s national team under the watchful eye of manager Mauricio Pochettino. On Saturday, Luna earned his second cap in the 3-1 friendly win against Venezuela, and in 25 minutes of work, showed his ability to keep possession in tight spaces.

The Sunnyvale, Calif. native has made it this far by trusting his instincts, whether it was leaving the San Jose Earthquakes academy at age 15 to head to the Barcelona Residency Academy in Casa Grande, Ariz., heading to the USL Championship with El Paso Locomotive three years later, or finally landing with Real Salt Lake in 2022 and last year recording eight goals and 12 assists on his way to earning MLS‘ Young Player of the Year. The USMNT’s January camp is the next step.

“It’s all about timing and when something’s going to happen for you, right?” Luna told reporters prior to Saturday’s game. “So for me, I think performing and getting the opportunities like that is what we work for, and the level’s been great. I think that this week has been unreal.”

Talk to anyone who has watched Luna for an extended period of time, and the same phrase keeps coming up. Luna, they say, is “a little bit different.” This is basically U.S. soccer speak, used to describe a creative player who is a rarity in the American system, one who — beyond his ability to find passes and goals — plays different, and maybe even looks different.

Back when Luna was making his way through the Quakes academy, the feedback from U.S. Soccer types was that Luna was unfit and even overweight. It took the Quakes showing the USSF player evaluators the fitness program Luna was on, insisting that he was “barrel chested” and not overweight. The message finally got through, with a call-up to the U15 national team soon following.

“We try not to work on opinions. It’s true, though: Luna had a different body type,” said Tony Lepore, the current head of talent identification for the USSF. “But for us, it’s part of what we train our scouts and coaches that we have to be patient with all that. And it’s never linear. Players develop in all areas.”

Luna’s physique wasn’t the only thing that was different. He thought differently, too.

Throughout his life, Luna has shown an innate ability to look inward and sense what he needed to do and where he needed to go, no matter how unconventional it might appear. When Luna arrived at Real Salt Lake, he decided to become a barista in a bid to improve his social skills. Later, a period of struggle led him to engage in therapy so he could try and understand himself better.

“I would say, for me, Diego has an old soul,” said RSL manager Pablo Mastroeni, a philosopher coach if there ever was one. “He’s a learner and he’s honest with himself, and he takes responsibility when he’s not doing things the right way.”

To hear Luna tell it, his old soul is an outgrowth of leaving home at a young ago. But even before he departed, there were feelings of isolation.

Luna was raised in a soccer-mad family full of coaches, including father Alberto, himself a former pro with the old San Jose Earthquakes and indoors with the San Diego Sockers and the Milwaukee Wave. Diego Luna’s three siblings are much older. Armando is 44, Giovanni is 32 and Kristal — an assistant coach at Sonoma State — is 29. It’s an experience that has never left him, no matter where he has gone.

“Always being young and living on my own, it was always just kind of, I had to make the right decisions,” Luna told ESPN. “I had to think farther than just at the moment. I think it was having to grow up with lessons rather than growing up with age. You had to learn as you went. At 14, you’re not doing grown-up things, so it’s different. And I think that’s kind of how I grew up. It was only me, my gut feeling, and that’s kind of where it led me to be.”

Listening to that inner voice resulted in an unorthodox path to the professional ranks. In San Jose, Luna appeared to have everything. These days, the academy route is the standard road to a professional career, but Luna felt some internal rumblings. Something wasn’t right.

He didn’t blame the Quakes’ setup, nor did he blame the staff. Luna said he felt “stuck” and “wasn’t improving.” He didn’t like the person he was becoming, either.

“I would say I was a bad kid,” Luna said. “A kid that had trouble in school, was not behaving the best, and I think it was just because that’s kind of just what it was at that time. And I needed to grow up. I needed to wake up if I knew that that’s not how my life wanted to be and where I wanted to end up.”

Luna’s brother Armando, currently a youth coach with the Palo Alto-based Stanford Strikers, chalks it up as typical teenage angst, but the decision was made for young Diego to head to Arizona. Not that the early days were easy there, either. As much as Diego listened to his inner voice, sometimes he needed a push. Armando recalls plenty of phone calls where Diego was “almost crying and asking that he wanted to come home.”

“But my dad and I, we said, ‘No, you’re not coming back. You’re staying. You made a commitment and you’re going to fulfill that commitment,'” Armando said. “So we knew that it was really difficult for him to be away from the family because he was always with us. Since he was a little kid, he was always at the soccer field with us, and we knew that was going to be probably the biggest hurdle for him is how to deal with the being homesick.”

From there, Luna resumed his growth as a player, but after three years, he felt the itch to take the next step. Again, he went the unconventional route: rather than go to MLS, he landed in the USL Championship with El Paso Locomotive. In El Paso, Luna had the freedom to play and show off his creativity. He credits coaches Mark Lowry and John Hutchinson with pushing him when he needed it.

After scoring 13 goals in 41 matches with El Paso, Luna headed to RSL. While the increase in level and competition was welcomed, he found himself facing the same feelings of isolation. With lots of idle time, he took a side job as a barista at a local Dutch Bros. coffee shop.

“I was like, well, I could make some extra money on the side, but also work on things that I’m horrible at; communication skills, eye contact, things like that,” Luna said. “I was always getting nervous. I was always kind of awkward in situations like that. So I just thought why not try this out? Learn things that if I wasn’t a soccer player, I could be doing.”

That wasn’t the end of Luna looking inward. At the start of the 2024 season, Luna wasn’t playing with the consistency he needed. He had recently become a father as well, with the added responsibility that brings.

“You’re not just playing for fun anymore,” Luna said. “You’re playing to take care of people. You’re playing as a job and to make money and to perform well to make sure that your family has a great life.”

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In April, Mastroeni — who was constantly imploring Luna to be more of a two-way player — felt compelled to pull him from the lineup. The mental strain of being a professional was taking a toll, while some family issues rose to the surface as well. More than once during the interview, Luna spoke of “not being close to [his] family,” this, despite soccer being so present in his family life. Luna noted that those are two different things.

“Soccer was the thing that connected the family, but outside of soccer, I wasn’t close,” he explained. “I wasn’t really that close to them. … I was never really that comfortable speaking to my family about certain topics, about deeper things.”

Armando, in many ways, is a second father to Diego given their age difference. He was constantly checking on his younger sibling and sensed something was off. Based on the positive experience another family member had with therapy, Armando recommended that Diego try it.

“We have to be in the modern world,” Armando said. “The modern athlete does not just take care of their body and work on the field and train their skill sets. They also have to improve their mind. They have to be mentally able to cope with social media, the criticism that you’re going to receive, and also being lonely, just being away from your family.”

It proved to be an awakening.

“The stereotypical man thinks about it, ‘I don’t need therapy. I’m too strong for that. I’m a man,'” Luna said. “And then there was just some hard times going on in life that I was struggling mentally. I was having some hard times being alone and stuff like that. And I just kind of pulled the trigger, I’m going to go to therapy and I’m going to just try it out. So I went to my first therapy class and I left feeling like a whole different person. It was being able to release things, express things, understand things that I didn’t know. I left refreshed.”

A goal in his next game against the Chicago Fire on April 20 catapulted Luna forward, all the way to the aforementioned Young Player of the Year award.

Mastroeni now lauds Luna’s presence on both sides of the ball, calling the player, “Our best defender on the front line.” The RSL manager recognizes improvement in other areas as well, and the challenges Luna faced in getting there.

“If you are the best player on your team in the academy, there’s almost a sense of entitlement oftentimes with younger players that do really well with youth national teams, and they do lack a little bit of humility to continue to get better,” Mastroeni said. “And so Diego is a rare case where he is so technically gifted, he’s got an ability to find passes and score goals, but yet he’s hungry, and he’s humble enough to know that he’s not the finished product yet, and he continued to work towards it each day.”

Engaging in therapy hasn’t been just about pushing Luna toward better times. A professional snub hit Luna last summer when he was left off the Olympic team roster, but the work he has done for himself allowed him to better handle the setback.

Now the hope is that Luna’s rise will pay even more dividends at the international level. He has options given his Mexican-American heritage, but for now, he’s moving forward with the USMNT — and he’s prepared to be patient.

“For me, it’s just kind of been continuing to work,” he said, “and it will come when it’s ready for you.”