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Maradona’s second goal against England in the ’86 World Cup is considered one of the best of all time.
Rebel, genius and contradictory.
Diego Maradona turns 60 this Friday, a day that many of us doubt would come given the complexity that surrounds this man.
He has lived a life that rose to the top and then descended into the deepest darkest of hopelessness, unable to deal with flattery and idolatry. But at the same time unable to survive without that status.
Maradona’s story is replete with incredible paradoxes, errors and rectifications, epic feats and anecdotes of declines and resurrections.
What is the real Maradona?
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Maradona is idolized by many generations of soccer lovers.
The boy from the shack in Villa Fiorito in Buenos Aires, a street talent and a man of the people?
Or is Maradona the god, myth, great avenger and embodiment of people’s dreams?
Leader since young
In 1968 Francis Cornejo, coach of a youth team affiliated with Argentinos Junior, had to travel to Villa Fiorito to check the boy’s age.
“He’s tiny, it can’t be that he’s eight years old,” was her reaction when she saw him play in a test.
The mother, Dalma Salvadora Franco, confirmed her age by showing her the birth certificate.
Francis had just performed the football equivalent of finding an oil field. He had found a gem to put the icing on his team.
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Maradona began to dazzle in his time at Argentinos Junior.
As of March 1969, the team didn’t get tired of winning, registering a 136-game unbeaten streak.
In his youth, Maradona’s father piloted a ferry that moved cattle from town to town and later went to work in a chemical factory, where I barely made enough to make ends meet with his large family in the shanty town where they lived.
The success of his son, the fifth of eight, meant that, in addition to becoming “the king of barbecue,” he would never have to work again.
When Diego was 15 years old, the family had already become the leader and asked his father to stay by his side.
From early on, Diego learned that leadership was a natural step forward and that age didn’t matter when there was a void to fill.
“Once we went to play in Brazil …”, recalls a former teammate, Ruben Favret, who like the rest of the squad played friendlies during the week to take advantage of Maradona’s pull.
“It was the era of color television and we all wanted to buy one and bring it home. The thing is that we had not been paid. Diego, aged 18, stood up and told Consoli (president of Argentinos Junior) that if they didn’t pay us, I wouldn’t play“.
Media impact
This was followed by a convoluted transfer to Boca Juniors that Maradona himself orchestrated. He had revealed to a journalist friend that the talks to sign him were advanced.
That’s when it broke loose the first media transfer in history, starring a still immature 20-year-old player.
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The transfer of Maradona Boca Junior had a great media impact.
The deal became surreal. What started as a $ 10 million direct transfer ended up as a last-minute loan involving six other Boca players, cash and other suspicious checks.
And is that nothing was simple and straightforward when it came to Maradona.
Immortal Maradona
The following year he went to Barcelona, but this club never saw the best of him.
Of the two years he spent there, he was punished or injured for half the time. He suffered a serious ankle injury after a very hard tackle by Andoni Goicoechea of Athletic Club.
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Barcelona never enjoyed the best Maradona.
After that, Maradona was the main protagonist of a massive fight during the final of the Copa del Rey. The incident cost him a five-month ban without playing in domestic competitions.
In fact, came close to bankruptcy, so a transfer with new financial incentives was necessary. Personally, he never adapted to life in Catalonia, where he felt like a foreigner.
Two months later he signed for Italian Napoli, where he would enjoy his most successful and at the same time most punishing period.
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During Maradona’s time at Napoli, the club won two Serie A and one UEFA Cup.
Maradona had moved into a noisy, crowded and heated environment where the Italian criminal organization, the Camorra, had been involved from the beginning.
In his years in Naples Maradona went from being the child of Villa Fiorito to becoming the brand. He fell in love with what it stood for and took on the glory and praise while being aware of how suffocating it was.
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Maradona became a myth and a media brand at Napoli.
Cocaine became his new reality, a place of extreme excitement he had never been to. This drug relieved him of the pressure of having to always prove that he was the best player in the world.
And in the middle came the moment when his status transcended and he became much more than a footballer.
How different would everything have been if Argentina had not defeated England with “the hand of God” in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, the “revenge” after four years since the defeat in the Falklands War?
That game made Maradona immortal to the eyes of your country.
In search of its origin
My latest project is a biography about Diego until his retirement as a footballer. The rest is too personal and unpleasant.
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How different would everything have been if Argentina had not defeated England with “the hand of God” in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, the “revenge” after four years since the defeat in the Falklands War?
To write it, I had to go to the place where it all began, in Villa Fiorito. Nobody wanted to take me there.
It was on my last day in Buenos Aires in early 2020, and I managed to convince a nervous taxi driver that he had picked me up at the airport the day I arrived.
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Villa Fiorito has a reputation as a poor and violent place.
We travel in nervous silence. The houses began to look like small boxes, surrounded by uneven pavements, half-finished railings, and neglected plants.
Trash bags accumulated outside small gardens and there were barefoot children kicking a ball.
The street narrowed and became a dirtier and more uneven road. I figured not much has changed since that first trip Cornejo made to find out Maradona’s age.
We turn to the right. A man walked in the middle of the narrow street to avoid the mountains of rubbish accumulated on the pavement.
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Maradona guided Argentina to the 1986 World Cup.
Without stopping and just lowering the window, the taxi driver asked her where Diego’s house was.
“There, 200 meters.” He stopped the car outside Maradona’s house, but kept the engine running.
All the plants were overgrown. It was the middle of the afternoon. Towards the back, it he could make out a shabby bungalow with a shadow over it.
A man in a white vest rose from his chair. “What are you looking for?” “Nothing, sir. My friend here just wants to see …”, replied the taxi driver as he started the car and left the street.
On the left I saw a dirty field with only one goal.
There is no sign on the route that tells the story of the area and its most famous resident. There are also no intentions to turn it into a tourist attraction. Nobody likes to show their miseries.
That was Diego’s house, but it was never Maradona’s, the man that boy later became.
Maradona today
In fact, it is difficult to find out what is left of that child today. Now he is the coach of Gimnasia de la Plata, an Argentine First Division club, and has never been able to leave the great scene.
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Maradona was presented sitting on a throne when he announced himself as the coach of Gimnasia de la Plata.
His life after retirement as a footballer is, to say the least, complex.
It is known that he has at least 11 children, and that his relationship with his ex-wife, Claudia Villafane, ended in court, in the same way as with his agent and close friend Guillermo Coppola.
He has coached several clubs. They adore him in Sinaloa, the Mexican team that he trained between 2018 and 2019.
As Argentina’s national coach, he failed between 2008 and 2010. Maradona he has never come close to reaching as high as a coach as he did as a footballer.
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Maradona’s life after his retirement is complex to say the least.
Diego claims that he stopped using cocaine three years ago, but his medication leaves him in a state of sedation.
That, his excessive weight for your taste for the good life and the numerous operations of when the players were neither protected nor respected, explain their physical difficulties.
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Maradona is the current coach of Gimnasia de la Plata.
Maradona admits that he doesn’t regret his actions; always understood that life is lived to the full.
That is why, now in his 60s and a wealth of experiences from someone much older, he can consider himself lucky to be alive.
And it will celebrate every day that it is.
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