A gloveless boy from Barranquilla: The remarkable story of Sheffield Wednesday keeper Devis Vásquez

He was speaking to his agent and had had word of interest from Italy in his services after bargain-hunting scouts had travelled from Europe for a closer look at the big goalkeeper.

He had played a total of only 31 senior matches in his career, all arriving after he had moved from his native Colombia.

Barely anyone in the football-mad country was aware of who he was or the fact that in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic given that he’d transferred as a back-up goalkeeper from Patriotas Boyacá, a struggling side later relegated from the top tier in 2022, to the ‘fourth-biggest club in Paraguay’ Club Guaraní.

Responding to requests from The Star for interviews aimed at providing a little background on Sheffield Wednesday’s new goalkeeper, two Colombia-based journalists politely advised they couldn’t help as they knew next to nothing about him. They’d never seen him play.

Why would they? Vásquez has never played a senior game of professional football in his home country and to all but those in Paraguay and a few well-stationed scouting networks, he barely existed.

It’s fair to say that interest from Europe had surprised a few - including the 23-year-old himself. Preferring to concentrate only on his football, desperate not to lose focus, Vásquez and his agent had agreed not to discuss which clubs were interested in him until deals were close.

Back on the phone, told that Serie A sides Salernitana and Udinese had launched efforts to take him to Italy, the then-23-year-old reacted with admirable maturity when told the deals weren’t going to happen.

The deals were dead, his agent told him, because he was going to AC Milan. He’d been offered a three-year contract and Paolo Maldini would pick him up at the airport.

This is the remarkable story of Sheffield Wednesday loanee Devis Vásquez.

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Barranquilla is a bustling seaport city set in the north of Colombia. Flanked by the Magdelena river less than five miles from the mouth of the Caribbean sea, it is gritty and working class in its nature and with 1.2m residents at last count is the country’s fourth-biggest settlement.

It’s known for playing host to one of the largest festivals in the world, the Carnaval de Barranquilla, which celebrates the different cultures practised in a city grown on immigration, largely from Europe after both World Wars, from the Middle East and Asia. Notable people born in Barranquilla include pop superstar Shakira and actress Sofía Vergara. Among its twin-cities is Aberdeen.

It is in Barranquilla that Devis Vásquez spent his formative years.

An initially shy and unassuming child, nervous by nature, Vásquez and his older brother Jorge lived with his mother Elina, who worked as a seamstress in a small shop in the market of La Magola in the centre of the city. His father, also Jorge, is said to have lived and worked in Medellín, his homecity, a 14-hour drive away.

It is through a combination of pure luck and a natural height inherited from his father that Vásquez was first thrown into a football team at the age of eight. Adolfo Cotes was the coach of youth sides at Gremio de Barranquilla and was short of a goalkeeper who as per league rules had to have been born in 1998.

It was mentioned to a mutual friend of his and the Vásquez family, who mentioned knowing a tall boy who loved football but had never played in goal.

A few days later, the family friend arrived hand-in-hand with the shy youngster to a dry football field in the La Magdalena neighbourhood in the south of the city.

Told Vásquez’s family could not afford to buy him goalkeeping gloves, coaches found him a pair and gifted them to him. They’re glad they did.

“He was quite shy, he spoke very little, you had to get the words out of him, but when he took on challenges he did it with seriousness,” Cotes recently told Colombian news outlet AS.

“He had something that caught our attention, the directors and teachers, he was very persevering. In goal it is not easy, it is a position where you have to constantly get up, sometimes you have to suffer, have resilience and you have to push forward. We quickly realised he doesn’t shrink so easily.”

Coaches remember a lack of coordination and confidence early on. But that hard work and no little talent paid off as he began to impress. He made the league representative team, the regional team and went forward to interest from teams in Medellín after a star turn in a national tournament.

“There was a match in Medellín in the Bellanitas Talent Tournament and Devis was brilliant,” Cortes remembered. “There was a teacher who saw him and immediately called his father to ask him to stay working there, to get him a job there, but to take the boy to Medellín.

“I think that that match, where we supported him a lot because he was going through a difficult situation, it catapulted him. I said, ‘let anyone stay, except the goalkeeper’. I think that was the beginning of all the good things that have happened to him.”

Vásquez would find himself locked in a battle for places with Homero Guerrero, a similarly talented goalkeeper who would go on to become a professional in the Colombian leagues. It was a friendly teenage rivalry that was felt to have driven him on.

He’d go on to sign for Patriotas Boyacá in Tunja, a 16-hour drive from Barranquilla, when he was 18, but would make no senior appearances. Loaned out to La Equidad, where he would play in their under-20 side, he took a surprise call in the early months of lockdown from a Paraguayan club called Club Guaraní.

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“Guaraní have always had a good way of investing in young, foreign players,” Roberto Rojas, a Guaraní podcaster and journalist, tells The Star. “Some other clubs tend to look at young players in Paraguay, out in the countryside or what have you, but Guaraní have done well looking further afield.

“They’ve typically gone for second or third tier Argentine or Uruguayan players, sometimes, Brazilian. With this one, they happened to have a good scouting network and noticed Devis, so they got him.”

The move came in a flurry. Vásquez’s physical attributes had raised him as a name at a number of clubs - Boca Juniors were said to be tracking his progress from his early years but were only allowed to register so many foreign players - but in terms of professional appearances he was yet to get his career underway. Guaraní took the plunge to take him for a nominal fee of €50k.

He started out and impressed in the club’s second-string before a stroke of luck - in his case at least - saw several members of the Guaraní first team return positive Covid-19 tests ahead of a match against the most successful team in Paraguay, Club Olimpia. Number one keeper Gaspar Servio was one of them. In February 2021, Devis Vásquez finally made his senior debut.

By now he was more mature and more confident than the little boy who held the hand of a family friend when attending his first football trial. A committed Christian, he is a reader of books designed to build mental strength and positivity and could be seen reading them on team coaches and in downtime.

In a miserable second half of the 2021 season he was given opportunities to play in the seniors and hit headlines for a last-gasp penalty save that earned them a win against Sportivo Luqueño. Such was the impact he made, Servio was loaned out to Argentine club Rosario Central and Vásquez became the number one.

Within months and 31 senior appearances he was being linked with clubs from Europe, particularly Italy. He picked up the phone to his agent and in January 2022 he signed for AC Milan for a reported deal worth upto €500k.

“It happened so fast for Vásquez,” Rojas told us. “He came as a youngster, was into the first team, had a good couple of months in what was a pretty bad season for his team and then to Europe. It’s incredible.

“It’s a really interesting move. It surprised a lot of people when he went to Milan, it’s the sort of transfer that doesn’t happen - Guaraní aren’t the biggest and nobody from the Paraguayan league goes straight to Europe let alone one of the biggest clubs in the world. It is very rare, players will perform well and go to Brazil or Argentina, more recently we’ve seen them go to the MLS or Mexico.

“Now we’re starting to see some players make the leap straight to Europe and Devis was one of the guys to do that. It’s showing Paraguayan football what it can do.”

Milan’s wealth of talent and registration rules around foreign players meant Vásquez was always likely to be sent on loan in the summer of 2023. And with Wednesday scouring Europe for potential solutions, with the club keen to add a player of physical strength and ball-playing ability to challenge Cameron Dawson, he signed for Sheffield Wednesday on a season-long loan.

He saved two penalties in a Carabao Cup shootout win over Stockport County on debut and this weekend with hope to add international caps to what has been a whirlwind career.

He had to wait, but the only way has been up for the gloveless boy from Barranquilla.