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To understand Diego Maradona you have to go to Villa Fiorito, where he was born 60 years ago. Not much has changed there. Unpaved roads, garbage bags in front of brick houses. Nobody wears crown masks here. Ten masks cost more than a kilo of meat.
The trip from the Buenos Aires airport would take 20 minutes. But the taxi driver refuses. “Too criminal, too dangerous, too many potholes.”
When stray dogs drink from the stream that runs through Villa Fiorito, then they vomit the streets. So this is where Diego Armando Maradona grew up.
“Only God is greater than Maradona”
His parents’ house is now a museum. Apart from two dozen photos of Diego, there is nothing to see. No trophies, no medals. “They would just steal them,” says Tito Campos, Diego’s childhood friend, who still lives in Villa Fiorito.
The children play soccer in the dusty place next door. They wear Messi and Ronaldo jerseys. They only know Maradona by hearsay. “Forget about Messi,” says Tito. Diego is the greatest of all time. Only God is bigger than Maradona. “He has not seen Diego since he moved to the capital at age 15 and signed his first professional contract with Argentinos Juniors.
Kung-Fu-Diego has hepatitis
In 1981 Maradona moved to Boca Juniors. The following summer he should have become the superstar of the World Cup in Spain. But in the second round Argentina lost to Italy and then to Brazil. In the South American classic, Diego saw red after a wild kung fu insert.
His transfer to Barcelona after the World Cup was also bad from the beginning. Hepatitis knocked him out of action for three months.
60 injured after a massive fight
Then, in the 1983/84 season, Andoni Goikoetxea (nickname: “the butcher”) of Athletic Bilbao gained dubious fame after breaking Maradona’s left ankle. Maradona was away again for months.
When Diego had just gotten into shape for the return leg against Athletic, he started a massive fight after the final whistle that had never been seen before in Spanish football. Players, supervisors and officials attacked each other. In the end, 60 people were injured.
Maradona was outlawed for three months and fled to Naples.
Napoli goes crazy
When Maradona was driven in the back seat of a VW Golf through the narrow streets of Naples to the San Paolo Stadium on July 5, 1984, the city was turned upside down.
80,000 watch Diego juggle the ball multiple times.
Maradona wins two championships with Napoli. In 1986 he was proclaimed world champion with Argentina. His two goals in the quarter-finals against England, one with his left hand and the other after a solo career that many say was the best goal ever scored in a final, are football history.
Prostitutes, cocaine and mafia
Maradona is up to the job. He could probably have walked on water with the ball on his foot. But reputation grows more than man. Maradona holds parties of crazy coca with prostitutes and champagne from Monday to Thursday, and many times he does not appear again in football clothes until the last training session. He surrounds himself with mobsters, wears a fur coat and a different Rolex every day.
“Damn sons of bitches” in the World Cup final
That works as long as Napoli wins the weekend. And until he throws the Italians out of the tournament at their home World Cup in 1990, of all places, at the Naples stadium.
In the final against Germany, Maradona and his Argentines have the whole stadium against them. “Damn sons of bitches,” Diego says to the man next to him when the Argentines get up before the kick-off of the anthem, which is whistled mercilessly by 74,000 people.
The decline of God
In March 1991, Diego tested positive for cocaine for the first time after a game against Bari. 15 month ban. The beginning of the end. When he returned to Seville in 1992, Diego only impressed two policemen when he drove his Porsche through the intersection when it was red and then insulted the officers in the worst possible way. Before the World Cup final in 1994, after Argentina lost 5-0 at home to Colombia, then-Argentine President Carlos Menem made a personal commitment to bring Diego back to the national team.
In the training ground before the World Cup, Maradona shoots journalists with an air rifle. At the US tournament, the next positive doping result, after which Diego tearfully announced that his legs had been “cut off.”
Go back to the field one more time. For Boca Juniors, his club of heart. The most spectacular image of this time shows him kissing his partner Claudio Caniggia on the mouth after scoring a goal.
Suddenly national coach
On his 37th birthday, he resigns permanently. But there is nothing calmer about him. Diego is completely out of control. He nearly died in 2000 after a cocaine overdose and three nights of partying.
Diego tries to train with manageable success. At the 2010 World Cup, as coach of the Argentine national team, he did not meet Thomas Müller on the eve of the quarterfinals against Germany. Argentina falls 0-4. Müller scores in minute 3 to make it 1-0.
Just another caricature of himself
After unsuccessful adventures as a manager in the United Arab Emirates, Diego ended up at the Dorados de Sinaloa in the Mexican second division two years ago. Now you have to know that the most powerful drug cartel in the world is based there. Diego’s monthly salary is $ 50,000 and he is involved in the sale of Dorados T-shirts, all of which, of course, bear his name.
Previously, for example at the 2018 World Cup, Diego was seen completely disoriented insulting Nigerians and South Koreans on the VIP balcony and nodding his head to turn away his swollen face while he slept. Maradona is a caricature of himself, thick as a rain barrel, despite the gastric band.
“You are killing him!”
Then there was this interview from the car in which Diego collapsed on himself with the engine running and even the Argentine reporters barely understood a word.
The last call for help came a year ago, after Maradona’s 59th birthday, by his daughter Giannina, when Diego was dancing in the living room drunk and surrounded by false friends. “They are slowly killing him and he does not realize it,” he wrote on Instagram.
Is the “Police” Maradona dry?
Diego is now the coach of the Argentine first division club Gimnasia de la Plata. Maradona leads the units mostly seated, even for short distances he has to take the golf kart.
But there are also better days in the life of Diego Armando Maradona. Last July, when his team resumed training, Diego appeared in a black BMW in which he had installed police siren and flashing lights. Drive through the practice area.
More recently, people around him said that Diego had not drunk alcohol for weeks. He is fresh physically and mentally.
Quarantined birthdays
For his 60th birthday on October 30, Diego wanted two things: that he could spend it with all his children; now there are at least eleven, from ten different women. Nothing will come of that. Diego is in quarantine because one of his bodyguards tested positive.
Nor is his second wish likely to come true: ‘I want to score another goal against England. This time with the right hand. “
* Martin Arn was a correspondent in Argentina for six years. His editor-in-chief at the time fortunately decided not to have an exclusive interview with Maradona in 2009, which would have cost $ 35,000.
