Diego Maradona

On October 30, 1960, in the impoverished Buenos Aires suburb of Lanús, Diego Armando Maradona entered the world as the fifth of eight children in a family that had migrated from the interior. The shantytown of Villa Fiorito, where the family settled, was a place of corrugated iron roofs and dirt floors, and football was its only currency of hope. By the age of three Diego was inseparable from a ball; by eight he was performing at half-time intervals for the youth team Los Cebollitas, juggling for the crowd with an ease that made spectators stop mid-bite and stare. Scouts from Argentinos Juniors watched him and could not believe he was not older, or at least gifted in some way that ordinary mathematics could explain.

He made his professional debut for Argentinos Juniors at fifteen years and eleven days old, in 1976 — the youngest player ever to play in Argentina's First Division at the time. What followed was a decade of escalating magnificence. He moved to Boca Juniors in 1981, then to FC Barcelona in 1982 for a world-record fee of £5 million. At the Nou Camp he was adored by the fans and suffocated by opponents who could think of no other way to stop him; a brutal foul by Athletic Bilbao's Andoni Goikoetxea in 1983 broke his ankle and nearly ended his career before it had reached its summit. He recovered, and moved on.

The real apotheosis came at Napoli, the impoverished southern Italian club he joined in 1984 for another world-record fee. Naples — perennially looked down upon by the wealthy north of Italy — adopted him as a messiah. He delivered two Serie A titles (1986–87 and 1989–90), a UEFA Cup (1988–89), and a Coppa Italia. He ate in the same trattorias as dockworkers and spoke in a dialect the locals understood. For seven years he was not a footballer in Naples but a deity; when he left, the city declared a day of mourning. They have never really gotten over him.

The 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico stands as the single most remarkable individual performance in the tournament's history. Maradona dragged a moderate Argentine squad to the title on the force of his genius alone, scoring five goals and providing five assists in the knockout rounds. Against England in the quarter-final he scored two goals in four minutes that together encompass the entire spectrum of human possibility in sport. The first — punched into the net with his left hand while the referee looked the other way — he described afterwards with spectacular audacity as "a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God." The second, four minutes later, began in his own half, bypassed five English players and the goalkeeper in eleven seconds of the most breathtaking dribbling ever recorded, and was later voted the Goal of the Century by FIFA readers worldwide. Two goals, four minutes apart, representing cheating and transcendence simultaneously: the man was a philosophy in football boots.

His personal struggles were as operatic as his football. Addiction to cocaine, suspension from the game for fifteen months in 1991 following a positive test, complicated relationships with authority in every jurisdiction he inhabited — Maradona's life off the pitch was as turbulent as his play on it was fluid. He managed the Argentine national team between 2008 and 2010, taking them to the World Cup quarter-finals in South Africa with a style that was chaotic, passionate and utterly his own. He became a symbol for the global left, wearing a Che Guevara tattoo and befriending Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, positioning his working-class origins as the root of his genius.

On November 25, 2020, Diego Armando Maradona died of a heart attack at his home in Tigre, Buenos Aires, at the age of sixty. The grief that followed was on a scale reserved for heads of state. Argentina declared three days of national mourning; thousands queued for twenty-four hours to file past his coffin in the Casa Rosada; cities across South America fell quiet. He had been flawed, impossible, generous, infuriating, and incandescent — a human being as imperfect and brilliant as the sport he ennobled. No player has made more people feel more alive simply by running with a ball at his feet.