THE MAKING OF RÚBEN DIAS 

Published: 25/08/2026 | By: Alex Courbat

There’s a kind of football story that doesn’t start with trophies or transfer fees. It starts in car parks at ridiculous hours. With parents clocking miles they never talk about. With a kid who isn’t “talented enough” yet – just stubborn enough to keep showing up. This is that story. 

There is a moment every young footballer knows. The first day at a new club, bigger than anything you have known before, where the smell of the place alone tells you that something has shifted. For Rúben Dias, that moment came at the age of eleven, when he walked through the doors of Benfica’s academy for the first time. 

He had grown up kicking a ball around the streets and school fields of Amadora, a working-class suburb wedged between Lisbon and Sintra, and had done well enough at local club Estrela da Amadora to earn his shot at the country’s biggest institution. “The kids, the smell of the place,” he says, the memory landing somewhere between warmth and wonder. “You just feel like, this is next level. The smallest detail would be just so meaningful, and everything would just make you feel like, okay, this… I’m on the path to reach something big.” 

The path, as it turns out, was less a smooth corridor than a series of doors that needed forcing open, again and again, year after year. At Estrela, Rúben had been one of the standout players, the kind of kid others look to on the pitch. Then he arrived at Benfica, and suddenly he was just another face in a group of talented boys all chasing the same dream. “And then you have to actually do it again,” he says. “Then you do the season, you do well, and then the next year, another ten guys come out of nowhere. And you have to do it all over again and again and again.” 

In Portugal, where football runs deeper than just sport, the competition in the academies of clubs like Benfica is ferocious from the very first whistle. Every training session, every practice match, a small battle that had to be won if you wanted to see the next one. Rúben is clear-eyed about what that relentless pressure did to him. “That kind of becomes the way you are,” he says. “And if you approach the situation with the right mindset, it also builds you as a human being.” 

But no child builds themselves alone, and Rúben is emphatic on this point. His parents, he says, sacrificed quietly and without complaint, working hard while making sure that neither he nor his brother ever felt unsupported. No game missed, no training session unattended. “They would never miss out on a chance, not a chance even, but any kind of commitment my brother and I had. Whatever our life would demand, they would always make sure they were there.”  

What he values most, looking back, is not the cheerleading but the honesty. When things went badly on the pitch, his father’s instinct was never to deflect blame elsewhere. It was always: what did you do? What could you have done better? “Maybe it seems like nothing,” Rúben says. “But I feel like in the long term, these habits of building yourself through, first of all, looking at yourself and what you can do better, it makes the whole difference.” 

Then there is his grandfather, a figure Rúben speaks about with a particular kind of quiet reverence. During a stretch when his father could not make the journey to training, it was his grandfather who stepped in. Day after day, he would collect young Rúben from school at four in the afternoon, sit in the car through thirty or forty minutes of Lisbon traffic, and then wait at the training ground, sometimes until eleven o’clock at night, because the boy was so consumed by his craft that he simply did not want to leave. “He did it for a long period of time,” Rúben says. “He was the happiest person in the world. He was so supportive in that moment and never thought twice.” What strikes Rúben most, even now, is the meaning behind it. “That sacrifice: expect nothing from me, but I’ll give you everything I’ve got.” 

Those years at Benfica, spanning seven years in the academy and then three in the senior side, shaped everything. The facilities, the coaches, the level of competition, the international tournaments that put you in the shop window for the national team. Rúben describes it as a stage defined by standards rather than comfort, and he means it entirely without irony. When asked whether he might one day return, he pauses before answering with the honesty of a man who has genuinely sat with the question. “I’m very grateful for the twelve years I spent there. If I’m going to go back or not, I don’t know. Life will tell me.” What he does know is that he left with no regrets. “When I was there, I did it all.” 

The move to Manchester City in September 2020 was a gamble that paid off almost immediately. In his first season at the Etihad, Rúben won both the FWA and Premier League Player of the Season awards, an almost unheard-of double for a defender arriving in a new league. But it was the treble in 2022–23, culminating in that Champions League final in Istanbul, that cemented his place in the club’s history. He is candid about how special that chapter felt. “The treble, the four in a row. It doesn’t get much better than that. I’m happy to be where I am.” 

What is striking, though, is how much of his attachment to the Premier League predates his involvement in it. As a teenager in Amadora, it was the league he watched above all others, drawn in by its chaos and its relentless quality. He would sit through Stoke against Southampton and find himself genuinely hooked.  

He watched Mourinho’s Chelsea. He watched the North London Derby. And he still remembers, with the vivid recall of someone who experienced it in real time, the moment Kun Agüero collected from Mario Balotelli and slammed the ball past Paddy Kenny in the 94th minute to give City their first title in 44 years. “I would watch any game. I would be watching Stoke against Southampton and enjoying that game, you know?” he says, laughing.  

It is a league he didn’t just admire from afar, but studied in real time, long before he ever stepped into it. And that matters to him in a way that’s difficult to overstate. “If I was to have played in any other league and never played in the Premier League in my career, I feel like I would have a gap in my heart,” he says. “This is the league I used to watch at home. This is where you want to be recognised.” 

The boy from Amadora didn’t shortcut anything. He didn’t glide into the game’s elite; he climbed into it, step by step, through repetition, pressure, and expectation that never eased. And now, standing at the top of it, there’s no sense of arrival as relief – only recognition. That everything he became was built long before the trophies, long before the stadium lights, in car parks at midnight, in training grounds that emptied after everyone else had gone home. He didn’t just reach the top. He made the climb part of his identity.