fast (left) lane rather than crossing from one side to the other.

“I am not going into the circumstances,” Angel Blanco, a local government official, told reporters at a hastily arranged media conference. “The car overturned, the car was burnt and the result was lethal: two young people died. There has to be an investigation.”

Jose Fernandez Blanco, the mayor of Puebla de Sanabria, told The Athletic: "For a small town like ours, these tragedies are a source of consternation, anger that such young people, in the prime of their lives, have lost their lives.

"We express all our sorrow and sympathy for the family, the parents, the wife, the children. These are difficult tragedies to deal with. To talk about it now (the state of the road)... it is not the right time. It will be the time for the expert and police reports."

Jota and his brother had left Portugal and were heading towards Santander on Spain’s northern coast. Their plan was to get some rest in Benavente, midway through the journey, and then resume the drive in time to board a ferry in Santander that would take Jota to England later on Thursday.

It would have been a 300-mile drive, taking almost six hours, and the average ferry journey is 30 hours to Portsmouth on the south coast of England, still a considerable distance from Liverpool in the north west.

Why did he not fly, as would ordinarily be expected? That was because Jota had recently undergone some sort of surgery and, as such, the doctors had advised him to travel by ferry rather than the air.

As it was, they never made it as far as Benavente. The force of the collision took the Lamborghini through the roadside barriers. Trapped inside the burning wreckage, both men were declared dead at the scene.

Officials in Liverpool’s media department started taking calls from journalists at around 9am and, understandably, there was not a great deal they could say at first.

Staff had only scant details, as well as having to cope with their own grief. Message after message, call after call, was coming in. But everything had to be checked, and double-checked, before the club could make any comment and, uppermost in their minds, they knew there was a grieving family trying to take in the worst possible news.