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From: Erik niva
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Here’s a soccer ball. Most people pump it with air.
Diego Maradona filled her with meaning, with color, with genius and madness, with indomitable struggle and enchanting magic.
It’s gone now.
Soccer just looks like a soccer ball again.
Was it the best of all time?
Honestly, I don’t care. That is not the most important thing to me.
It is often joked about how soccer is about winning titles, but that is simply not true.
It’s not my football.
My football is about bringing people closer together, togetherness and community. About creating joy, pride, and hope, especially where those things are hard to find.
Titles are the means, not the end.
Diego Maradona sells VM. Diego Maradona sells Serie A.
There are many soccer players who have done that, although hardly anyone has come this close to winning them on their own.
But the dents themselves, the titles themselves? They didn’t make it unique.
It was who he won the titles with, how many times he did it and what he made them stand for.
Photo: Carlo Fumagalli / TT NEWS AGENCY
Diego Maradona after the 1986 World Cup gold.
Never became one of them
Nobody has made football an act of resistance and an act of restoration like Diego Maradona.
When Argentina won the 1986 World Cup, it was only a few years after the humiliating defeat in the Falkland Islands war that it came close to destroying the self-image of a people in distress.
The quarterfinals against England were not a football match, it was a great national catharsis.
When Napoli raised the Serie A crest the following year, it did not mean that a light blue sports club won a competition. It signified the restoration, redemption and liberation of the whole of southern Italy oppressed, humiliated and ridiculed.
Diego Maradona knew all this. He understood it, valued it, and played his football for a reason and for a purpose.
Today, many of us look at hyper-marketed elite football with increasingly dual sentiments, having a hard time coming to terms with how what was once created by people is now hijacked by the industry.
This transformation coincided with the culmination of Diego Maradona’s career, but he never became the type of footballer who lets the market rule his heart or his ball shoes.
He never changed sides. He never became one of them.
That’s why the planet of the football round is crying tonight
Over time, he got lost more and more, making worse and worse decisions at increasing cost to both himself and his loved ones.
However, he was always forgiven and loved, as an eternal thank you for the football he played and the games he played. He was human, very human, vulnerable, flawed, and outcast rather than mechanical, robotic, and indestructible.
They used to call the brass dribbler Garrincha “Alegria do Povo”, which in Portuguese means “joy of the people”. There was nothing wrong with that, but where Garrincha remained local, Diego Maradona was global.
She was Argentinian, she was Naples, but she was also a leader of the poor, the forgotten and the marginalized throughout the Third World.
This is how I mostly remember it. And that’s why the entire football planet is crying tonight.
Was it the best of all time?
Maybe, maybe not. It is possible to argue both for him and for Pele and Leo Messi, but it would still be losing the point itself.
Diego Maradona was the greatest. Diego Maradona was the most important. Diego Maradona meant more to more people than any other athlete.
Nobody has done what he did with a soccer ball, and then I don’t write about dribbling, deep passes or free throws. I mean the primal power itself, the ability to really change the world with a pair of studded shoes on my feet.
That power was so strong in Diego Maradona that he never managed to channel it within himself, but rather transmitted it to the masses who made it their own.
They may forget some of the goals he scored. Perhaps they were too young to experience them at all. However, they will never forget the feeling, the strength and the joy it gave them.
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