Diego Maradona, who played like a god and spent three decades proving he wasn’t

Diego Maradona

Photo: Alexandr Mysyakin / soccer.ru (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Born	October 30, 1960 Lanús
Died	November 25, 2020 (60)
Occupation	Footballer
Awards	World Cup Golden Ball u00b7 L’u00c9quipe Champion of Champions u00b7 FIFA Player of the Century

The quarterfinal against England in June 1986 produced, inside four minutes, the most dishonest goal ever scored at a World Cup and the most transcendent one. Maradona punched the ball into the net with his left hand, told the referee it was God who did it, and held the straight face long enough that the decision stood. Then he collected the ball in his own half, beat five English defenders with a 60-yard solo run so precise and relentless that by the time the ball crossed the line the stadium had effectively stopped breathing. Nobody left the ground that afternoon prepared to argue about morality. That game is where Diego Maradona finished becoming a myth. The rest of his life was the question of what happened to the man underneath.

He was born in 1960 in Villa Fiorito, a slum on the southern edge of Buenos Aires, the fifth of eight children in a family that had migrated from the Corrientes province. His father worked in a bone-meal factory. The family’s first television arrived when Diego was a teenager. The ball arrived earlier — he received it at age three, and by ten he was the mascot of Los Cebollitas, the youth side of Argentinos Juniors, helping them to an unbeaten run of 136 matches. That story has been told so many times it has acquired the contours of a legend, but it started as pure, verifiable fact: the boy was simply different.

He turned professional at fifteen, and by the time he was seventeen he was already famous enough in Argentina that not calling him up for the 1978 World Cup required an explanation from the national coaching staff. He left Boca Juniors for Barcelona in 1982 for what was then a world-record transfer fee, but the Barcelona years were unhappy. A hepatitis attack kept him sidelined for months, and a brutal late tackle by Andoni Goikoetxea broke his ankle and kept him out for most of another season. He started taking cocaine during this period — a detail that would shape the next three decades of his life as completely as any goal.

The move to Napoli in 1984 changed everything. He cost Napoli more than any player had ever cost any club, and the city received him not as a footballer but as a promise. Naples had been historically scorned by northern Italy — poorer, louder, slower to modernize — and Maradona’s arrival was understood not just as a sporting investment but as something close to a political event. He won Napoli their first Serie A title in 1986-87, then a Coppa Italia in 1987, then a UEFA Cup in 1989, then a second Serie A in 1989-90. The Stadio San Paolo — renamed the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona in the weeks after his death — holds murals of him that have been maintained for forty years.

The 1986 World Cup in Mexico remains the clearest case in football of one player deciding a tournament by himself. Argentina did not have a particularly strong squad; what they had was Maradona, who in the course of six matches provided the kind of performances that end arguments about greatness. The goal against England has been voted the best in World Cup history in multiple polls. The Golden Ball he won for that tournament sits alongside his share of the FIFA Player of the 20th Century award — joint with Pelé, a ranking that satisfied neither man’s partisans but accurately described the territory.

But the cocaine, which had been an open secret in Naples for years, eventually became the story. In March 1991 he tested positive and received a fifteen-month ban, ending his time at Napoli. Later that year he was arrested in Buenos Aires for possession and trafficking. He played at the 1994 World Cup in the United States and was sent home after the second game when a drug test came back positive for ephedrine — a result that remains disputed in its specifics but was not disputed in its essential message about Maradona’s relationship with substances. His international career ended there, without the dignity the performance had earned.

The post-playing years produced their own complicated record. He managed Argentina’s national team between 2008 and 2010, navigating a disastrous qualifying campaign that required a 6-1 win over Peru in the final game — which he obtained — and then reaching the quarter-finals of the South Africa World Cup before losing heavily to Germany. His touchline behaviour was theatrical, his tactical acumen debated, his charisma intact. He was always the most interesting person in any room he entered, and the room was sometimes a press conference and sometimes an emergency room.

The question of how much of his destruction was chosen and how much was enabled has never been cleanly answered. In November 2020 he died of cardiac arrest at his home in Tigre, Buenos Aires Province, eight days after being discharged from a clinic where he had undergone surgery for a brain blood clot. Seven members of his medical team have since been charged with culpable homicide. A trial began in Argentina in March 2025, was declared a mistrial in May 2025 after a judicial scandal, and a new trial began in April 2026. The courts are still working through who was responsible for the conditions of his death — a question that implicates not just a handful of doctors but the entire system of enablement that surrounded him for the last two decades of his life.

Argentina declared three days of national mourning when he died. Naples stopped. The Iglesia Maradoniana — a mock religious movement founded in his honour in 1998, with its own commandments and its own calendar — now has an estimated 200,000 registered members across 130 countries. His family has proposed building a public mausoleum where fans can visit his remains. None of this is especially unusual for Argentina, where the relationship between public grief and football has its own theology. What is unusual is that the courts are simultaneously trying to determine criminal liability for his death, and nobody expects a clean verdict.

Tags: sports, Argentina, athletes, footballers, 1986 FIFA World Cup, Carlos Bilardo

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