Diego Maradona

Anyone asking who was Diego Maradona has to begin in Villa Fiorito, a poor settlement on the southern edge of Buenos Aires. Diego Armando Maradona was born on October 30, 1960, in Lanús, Argentina, the fifth child and first son of Diego Maradona senior, a factory worker, and Dalma Salvadora Franco, known as Dona Tota ^[1]. The family lived in a small house without reliable plumbing, and the young Diego later described a childhood defined by scarcity and by an almost total devotion to the ball his cousin gave him at age three ^[2].

At eight he was spotted by a scout while playing for Estrella Roja, a neighborhood side, and joined Los Cebollitas (the Little Onions), the celebrated youth team of Argentinos Juniors. The team went on an unbeaten run stretching over a hundred matches, and the tiny playmaker became a local curiosity, entertaining crowds with ball-juggling displays at halftime of first-division games ^[2]. Coaches doubted his age because his skill seemed impossible for a child, a suspicion he answered by producing his identity card.

His rise was unusually fast even by Argentine standards. Ten days before his sixteenth birthday, on October 20, 1976, Maradona made his professional debut for Argentinos Juniors, becoming one of the youngest players ever to appear in the Argentine first division ^[1]. Four months later he won his first cap for the national team, though coach César Luis Menotti left the 17-year-old out of the squad that won the 1978 World Cup on home soil, a decision that wounded Maradona deeply and that he recalled with bitterness for decades ^[3].

Compensation of a kind arrived in 1979, when Maradona captained Argentina to victory at the FIFA World Youth Championship in Japan and was named the tournament's best player ^[1]. By then he was the dominant figure in Argentine domestic football, finishing as the first division's top scorer in multiple seasons while still a teenager. In 1981 he completed a move he had wanted since childhood, joining Boca Juniors, and promptly led the club to the Metropolitano championship, the only league title he would win in Argentina ^[2].

The 1982 World Cup in Spain brought harsher lessons. Argentina, the defending champions, were eliminated in the second group phase, and Maradona, marked ferociously throughout, was sent off against Brazil for retaliation ^[1]. Days after the tournament he joined FC Barcelona for a transfer fee reported at the time as a world record, roughly 5 million pounds ^[2].

His two seasons in Catalonia mixed brilliance with misfortune. He suffered a bout of hepatitis, and in September 1983 a violent tackle by Athletic Bilbao defender Andoni Goikoetxea broke his left ankle, an injury that threatened his career ^[2]. He recovered to help Barcelona win the Copa del Rey, but his time there ended in disgrace when he was involved in a mass brawl during the 1984 cup final, fought in front of the Spanish king. Barcelona resolved to sell, and an ambitious mid-table Italian club made an offer that reshaped football history.

Any list of Diego Maradona achievements is anchored by the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, a tournament he dominated as few individuals have dominated any team competition. As captain he scored five goals and created five more, and Argentina defeated West Germany 3-2 in the final at the Azteca Stadium, with Maradona's pass releasing Jorge Burruchaga for the winning goal ^[1]. He was awarded the Golden Ball as the tournament's best player.

The quarter-final against England on June 22, 1986, produced the two most discussed goals of the twentieth century within the space of four minutes. For the first, Maradona rose with goalkeeper Peter Shilton and punched the ball into the net with his left fist, an offense the Tunisian referee failed to see. Afterward he said the goal had been scored 'a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God', a phrase that fixed the incident in football language forever ^[3]. The match carried an extra political charge in Argentina, coming four years after the Falklands War with Britain, and Maradona later wrote that the victory felt like a form of national reply ^[3].

The second goal needed no defense. Collecting the ball inside his own half, he ran some 60 meters past four England outfield players and Shilton before finishing, a sequence FIFA users later voted the Goal of the Century in a 2002 poll ^[1]. Four years on, at Italia 90, a diminished Maradona still dragged Argentina to another final, beating Brazil and Italy along the way, before losing 1-0 to West Germany. His international career ended sourly at the 1994 World Cup in the United States, when he was expelled from the tournament after testing positive for the stimulant ephedrine ^[4]. He finished with 91 caps and 34 goals for Argentina.

Napoli paid a world-record fee, reported at about 6.9 million pounds, to sign Maradona from Barcelona in July 1984, and some 75,000 supporters filled the San Paolo stadium simply to watch his presentation ^[2]. The club had never won the Italian championship, and the Italian south, poorer and long condescended to by the industrial north, adopted him as something close to a civic cause.

Delivery came in 1987, when Napoli won the Serie A title and the Coppa Italia in the same season, setting off weeks of celebration across the city ^[1]. A second scudetto followed in 1990, and in 1989 Maradona led the club to the UEFA Cup, its first European trophy. In the 1987-88 season he was Serie A's top scorer. Those remain the only league titles in Napoli's history won during his lifetime, and murals of his face still cover walls in the Spanish Quarter ^[5].

The Naples years also fed his destruction. Maradona later acknowledged that his cocaine use, which had begun in Barcelona, deepened dramatically in Italy, and reporting in the Italian press tied his social circle to the Camorra, the Neapolitan organized-crime network ^[2]. In March 1991 he failed a doping test for cocaine and received a 15-month ban from football ^[4]. He left Italy that year, never playing for Napoli again, and after the suspension made brief, unsettled stops at Sevilla in Spain and Newell's Old Boys in Argentina before ending his playing career where his heart had always been, at Boca Juniors, in October 1997, five days before his 37th birthday ^[1].

Maradona married his long-time girlfriend Claudia Villafañe in Buenos Aires in 1989, and the couple had two daughters, Dalma and Gianinna, before divorcing in 2004 ^[4]. Paternity questions followed him for years. He long denied fathering Diego Sinagra, born in Naples in 1986, but an Italian court ruled otherwise, and the two eventually reconciled; late in life Maradona acknowledged additional children, including three in Cuba ^[4].

His health collapsed repeatedly after retirement. In 2000 he was hospitalized in Punta del Este, Uruguay, with heart trouble linked to cocaine, and in 2004 he suffered a severe heart attack in Buenos Aires that left him in intensive care ^[4]. He spent extended periods in Cuba receiving addiction treatment, where he formed a well-publicized friendship with Fidel Castro, and in 2005 underwent gastric bypass surgery to address obesity ^[1]. That same year he reinvented himself as a television host in Argentina, interviewing Pelé and Castro on his show La Noche del 10.

Politics ran through all of it. Maradona had a tattoo of Che Guevara on his arm and one of Castro on his leg, spoke frequently against United States policy in Latin America, and joined protests against the 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata ^[4]. He published an autobiography, El Diego, in 2000, which became a bestseller in Argentina and was later translated widely ^[3].

In October 2008, despite thin coaching credentials, Maradona was appointed head coach of the Argentina national team ^[1]. Qualification for the 2010 World Cup was turbulent, secured only in the final round of matches, and in South Africa his side won its group before being dismantled 4-0 by Germany in the quarter-finals. The Argentine federation declined to renew his contract that July.

He kept working in football's margins for the rest of his life. He coached Al Wasl in Dubai from 2011 to 2012, took charge of Fujairah in the UAE second division, led the Mexican second-tier club Dorados de Sinaloa to two league finals in 2018 and 2019, and in September 2019 became coach of Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata in the Argentine top flight ^[5]. His arrival at Gimnasia set off scenes of near-religious devotion, with a throne installed for him at the training ground.

On October 30, 2020, his 60th birthday, he appeared frail at a Gimnasia match. Days later he was hospitalized and underwent surgery for a subdural hematoma, a blood clot on the brain ^[5]. He was discharged to home care, and on November 25, 2020, Diego Maradona died of a heart attack at a rented house in Tigre, outside Buenos Aires ^[5]. Argentina declared three days of national mourning, and tens of thousands filed past his coffin at the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. An investigation into the adequacy of his medical care was opened, and several members of his medical team were later ordered to stand trial ^[6].

Any honest Diego Maradona biography ends with a paradox: a man of ordinary height, about 1.65 meters, with a left foot that redrew the limits of the game, and a life that repeatedly threatened to bury the athlete under the celebrity. In 2000 FIFA staged an internet vote for its Player of the Century, which Maradona won overwhelmingly; the governing body ultimately gave a shared award to Maradona and Pelé ^[1]. Debate over which of the two, later joined by Lionel Messi, ranks highest has never really stopped.

The monuments are unusually literal. In December 2020 Napoli renamed its home ground the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona ^[5]. In Buenos Aires, murals, shrines, and a church founded by fans in 1998, the Iglesia Maradoniana, treat him as a figure somewhere between athlete and saint. Asif Kapadia's 2019 documentary Diego Maradona, built from hundreds of hours of private footage from the Naples years, introduced his story to a new generation ^[6].

Among essential Diego Maradona facts, the numbers matter less than the manner: the 1986 tournament remains the clearest case of one player carrying a nation to a World Cup, and the Napoli titles remain the clearest case of one player lifting a club beyond its historical weight. His flaws were public, prolonged, and self-acknowledged. His countryman Jorge Valdano observed that Argentines saw in Maradona their own contradictions, which may explain why grief at his death crossed every social line in the country ^[2].