When Hansi Flick arrived as Barcelona coach in the summer, he found a young squad formed largely of the club’s youth players. Many key senior players had not come back from their late holidays after the European Championship and Copa America.
Little by little, the German started putting together the list of players he would take with him on Barca’s tour of the east coast of the United States. Usually, a manager would select three goalkeepers, but he chose four: Marc-Andre ter Stegen, Inaki Pena, Ander Astralaga and one other, less recognised name — 18-year-old U.S. youth international Diego Kochen.
“You deserve it,” Flick told the youngest of the four goalkeepers.
Flick had been working with Kochen for some time and there were many factors that influenced his decision to call him up, even if he knew he might not play in Barca’s three games.
The connection with Flick was instant — and not just because he speaks English, the same language the coach uses to communicate with his players.
People within Barcelona have been raving about Kochen’s potential for a while. Some see him as Ter Stegen’s long-term replacement when the 32-year-old German eventually moves on. And it did not take long for Flick to see the hype; he was immediately struck by the youngster’s talent and the seriousness with which he went about his work.
(Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Kochen has all the qualities you would expect of a Barca goalkeeper formed at their famed La Masia academy: quick reflexes, an impressive physique and good footwork, a must in the Catalan club’s preferred style of playing out from the back.
We spoke to those close to him and those who work with him, some on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, to find out who he is, and to tell his story…
Kochen’s father, Alex, is Venezuelan and mother, Arlet, is Peruvian. He likes to read and educate himself in his spare time — those close to him say if he had not been a professional footballer, they think he would have been a doctor. His musical taste ranges from Frank Sinatra to Billy Joel, who he has gone to see in concert several times with his family since he was a child.
The life of a goalkeeper is a lonely one out on the pitch and Kochen has always been happy in his own company, but he is also close to his family. He is well-liked by his Barcelona team-mates but often likes to withdraw into himself.
“You always see him pensive — he’s a person of long silences,” someone close to him told The Athletic. “But then you see him on the pitch and he transforms.
“Diego is an adult trapped in the body of a teenager.”
When he was a kid and would get nervous about a tournament, he would calm himself by going to the lake of the Sunset Lakes community in Miramar, Florida, and catch fish — which he would then throw back into the water.
(Photo credit: Kochen family)
His vocation as a goalkeeper was a clear from a young age, even if he started out playing in sessions without goals to teach kids ball control.
It was Kochen who insisted on being a goalkeeper, so much so that his coach at the time in Weston FC, who did not know what else to do to take his mind off the idea until he grew some more, took him to a tournament organised by ESPN at the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando.
The idea was for him to be a substitute, but the starting goalkeeper was ill that day and so Kochen had to step up. His coach hoped he would see how hard it was to be in goal so that he would park that ambition for a few years until he was old enough to handle it.
Instead, Kochen played well and fell in love with the position — nobody was going to stop him now.
U.S. Soccer first scouted Kochen in December 2017 when he was an 11-year-old playing for Weston FC at the Prospects Cup, an under-12 tournament in Kissimmee, Florida featuring some of the world’s best clubs. They had been alerted to Kochen’s ability via their strong connections and scouts with Weston, including Marcelo Neveleff, who was the director of coaching (DOC) at Weston at the time, and Javier Carrillo, who later became the DOC at Weston and is now the academy director at Orlando City.
They continued to track him once he moved to Barcelona with his family in 2018.
“From a very young age you could see he had something special,” Carrillo told The Athletic. “He was a very skilful goalkeeper; he had very quick reflexes from a very young age. He has the DNA of Barca.
“For me, Diego is the complete package: a good player and a great person. He added to the team, he always put his team-mates and the team ahead of him. He was a leader through his actions and very understanding of his team-mates’ mistakes, even if they cost him goals.
“When there are kids who have a lot of football talent and stand out very early, sometimes it is difficult for them to manage that situation. That was never the case with Diego — he was always very humble and worked for the rest of the team.”
His father Alex, seeing his son was serious about goalkeeping, wanted to find a specific goalkeeping coach to help him. That is when Ricardo Lopez came along, when Kochen was nine years old.
“When I saw him, I said, ‘Wow’. He had a technique that caught my attention for the age he was,” Lopez told The Athletic. “I realised he lived for football. He was a quick learner. I told his parents that he needed to work on the fundamentals and polish his technique but he had a lot of potential.
“I have many years’ experience as a coach and I have seen very few children have the ability to understand and do what I asked them to do as I saw him do.
“He was impressive, even at 10 years old. He was out of the ordinary. I told them that they had to send him to Europe, because his level was to leave the United States and go there. Besides, when I spoke to him, he transmitted a maturity and intelligence beyond his years.”
Kochen and his West Pines United team-mates, another team he played for at youth level in Miami (Photo credit: Kochen family)
Another figure who helped him was Luis Pascual, Valencia goalkeeper from 1992-1999 and a goalkeeping coach at Villarreal’s academy. Kochen’s father Alex contacted him to see if he could help his son for two months in the summer in Miami when he was still nine. Pascual became good friends with Kochen’s parents.
“He had very good co-ordination, both in terms of laterality and in terms of Diego’s strength. There was something special about him,” Pascual told The Athletic. “He had a very good predisposition in training.
“He enjoyed being a goalkeeper and he transmitted that calmness on the pitch. He was very calm genetically. He was aware of his advantages and his limitations.”
While at Weston FC, Kochen played in the inaugural Prospects Cup in 2017. They lost the final 3-0 against Manchester City — other clubs taking part included Real Madrid, Roma and Borussia Dortmund — but Kochen’s saves caught the eye of streamers who were broadcasting the game. Afterwards, he was interviewed by UNIVISION TV.
“So, what’s your future?” one reporter asked him.
“We are hoping to get into more tournaments like this, play better and find ways in order to improve, in order to play against teams like this in finals and win one time.”
“Wow, I’m surprised at your maturity in responding,” the reporter replied.
“I wasn’t paying attention to the badge on the opponents’ jersey. I was only focusing on what was in front of me,” Kochen told another. “But this was a challenge to test ourselves against great competition.”
He was 11 years old at the time.
Kochen won the golden glove award as the tournament’s best goalkeeper, which was presented to him by a 19-year-old Christian Pulisic.
Seven years on, in November 2024, Pulisic was asked by reporters what he made of Kochen after he was selected by USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino for the first time, for CONCACAF Nations League games against Jamaica.
“First of all, he’s a good kid,” Pulisic said. “He fits in well with the group.
“I’d be lying if I said I’d seen so much of him (in training), but I’ve seen him make a couple good saves, and that’s his job at the end of the day. And obviously he’s doing really well for himself over there (at Barcelona), so it’s exciting to see. We know he’s gonna have a bright future.”
The goalkeeper was selected to his first U.S. youth national team camp in January 2022, when the under-17 coach Gonzalo Segares summoned him as part of the group preparing for the 2023 U17 World Cup.
Quickly, Segares and the U.S. staff noted that Kochen stood out as a top talent. He started five of eight games for the U.S. over 2022, but elbow and back injuries, respectively, would keep him out of the CONCACAF championships and the U17 World Cup in 2023.
Kochen in training with the USMNT in September 2024 (John Dorton/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
Still, he was very much considered a top young goalkeeper in the U.S. system, and U.S. Soccer was well aware that Kochen was eligible to play for Peru and Venezuela. U.S. Soccer coaches had multiple conversations with Kochen about his pathway with the U.S., and that eventually led to his first senior call-up under interim manager Mikey Varas in September 2024.
“He’s a young player playing for Barcelona B that we see as a high potential player,” Varas said when the roster was announced. “This is an opportunity for him to come in and not only compete with the senior team, but also get an amazing experience so that we can keep building for our future.”
He is yet to make his debut for the senior team, but it is certainly good timing for Kochen to get his first looks with the U.S. The goalkeeper position is a historical strength for the U.S. men, from Tony Meola to Kasey Keller, Brad Friedel, Tim Howard and Brad Guzan.
Matt Turner beat out Zack Steffen for the job in the last World Cup cycle, but Turner hasn’t been playing consistently since moving to the Premier League from MLS in 2022 and Pochettino’s other options aren’t playing consistently too.
(John Dorton/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images)
Kochen, even at a young age, has a real chance to make an impression for the U.S. — especially if he finds himself getting first-team minutes any time soon at Barcelona.
U.S. Soccer may need to act swiftly though. Along with Kochen’s eligibility for other nations through his parents, there remains interest from Spain in particular.
Given his Latin American parents, Kochen can qualify as a Spanish national on residency grounds having been there for more than two years. Under normal circumstances, that would be 10 years.
Francis Hernandez, the Spain national team’s youth co-ordinator, is an admirer and it is understood that Kochen has begun the process of qualifying as a Spanish national, which would make him eligible to be called up by the national team.
In 2020, FIFA approved a rule change that allows players to switch national teams if they have played no more than three competitive matches at senior level before turning 21.
They would be unable to switch if they had appeared in World Cup finals matches or continental finals such as the Copa America or European Championship. Appearing in qualifying matches for one of those tournaments would not prohibit them switching teams.
When his mother was given a job opportunity with DHL in Barcelona, the Kochens left for Spain in 2018 to give their son a chance to pursue his dream. They signed Diego up for Fundacion Marcet, a football school in the north-east of the city.
One of Barca’s scouts saw him in action there and called the two people in charge of the club’s youth teams: Jordi Roura and Aureli Altimira.
“We saw him and knew we had to move fast,” Roura told The Athletic.
The club had recently been handed a FIFA transfer ban for signing underage non-European Union players, but Kochen’s situation did not pose a problem — as he had arrived in Barcelona thanks to his father’s job and did not join Barca directly.
“When we took him to Barca to try him out, I said we had to sign him and we had to do it now,” Roura said. “Goalkeepers and central defenders are the two positions where physique is really important — it can be decisive. We look at the parents, because nowadays a goalkeeper under six feet tall (around 183 centimetres) is already too small. He already had a very good physique at that age (Kochen is now 6ft 2in/190cm).
“Technically, he already had some good traits. Without having worked hard he already had good footwork. I talked to him and he surprised me. He was a very focused kid, serious, hard-working and eager to learn. And he was so young. There were a lot of factors that made you want to sign him; he was special.”
Kochen signed for Barca aged 12 in 2019. He progressed through the youth ranks and was part of the Juvenil A Under-19 squad last season — although he also trained with Barcelona Atletic, the club’s second team, and even with the first team at times.
He made his unofficial debut for the first team in a friendly in Dallas in December 2023, when the team — then managed by Xavi — lost 3-2 against Mexican side Club America. That allowed him to get closer to his childhood idol: Ter Stegen.
“It’s a dream, because all of a sudden you’re here one day playing in Florida state and the next you’re in the best youth teams in the world,” Kochen said in an interview with Telemundo in summer 2024.
“Being a goalkeeper, it was always Ter Stegen (he looked up to), from day one. He’s been my idol since I was 12 years old and now to share a dressing room with him? I saw him pass by and I couldn’t believe I was sharing the same space with him. He’s a gentleman.”
Kochen was not given a game in Barca’s pre-season tour of his homeland last summer but did catch the eye of Flick and sporting director Deco in training. The latter sees him as the goalkeeper of the future for the first team.
Kochen appearing for Barcelona’s academy (Photo: FC Barcelona)
Barca have already tied him down to a new deal: in February 2024, they announced his renewal until 2028, although this was not finalised until last month due to what both parties called a “scheduling issue”.
His was one of the names mentioned when Ter Stegen suffered his serious knee injury at the end of September, although Kochen was himself recovering from a hamstring injury at the time. Still, Deco’s plan is for him to mature with Barca Atletic to gain confidence and experience.
Barcelona are delighted with him, as is the new USMNT coach Pochettino, and Kochen has his sights set on starring on the club and international stage.
He will need patience and his family’s support — just like when he first moved to the Catalan capital.
(Additional reporting: Paul Tenorio)
(Photos: Getty Images/Design: Eamonn Dalton)
