Diego Maradona

Diego Maradona: The Hand, the Goal, the Wreckage

Within four minutes at the Estadio Azteca on 22 June 1986, Diego Maradona scored the most dishonest goal in World Cup history and then the most beautiful one. The first he punched past Peter Shilton and afterwards described as struck "a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God." The second was a sixty-metre run through five England players that FIFA's 2002 public poll voted the greatest goal ever scored at a World Cup. Both were his, in the same half, against the same opponent. That contradiction is the whole man.

The Boy from Villa Fiorito

Maradona was born on 30 October 1960 in Lanus, in Buenos Aires Province, to a working-class family that raised him in the shantytown of Villa Fiorito. His father carried Guarani and Galician blood, his mother Italian and Croatian. He was handed a football at three. At eight, a talent scout found him playing for the neighbourhood club Estrella Roja and delivered him to Argentinos Juniors, where the coach Francisco Cornejo never quite recovered from the sight: "When Diego came to Argentinos Juniors for trials, I was really struck by his talent and couldn't believe he was only eight years old." With the Argentinos youth side, Los Cebollitas, he won two Evita Tournaments and went 141 games unbeaten, a run still regarded as the finest by any Argentine youth team. He turned professional on 20 October 1976, ten days short of his sixteenth birthday, wearing number 16, and scored his first goal on 14 November. He left in 1981 with 115 goals in 167 appearances, and in a single season at Boca Juniors took the only domestic league title he would ever win.

The First Man to Break the Transfer Record Twice

Barcelona paid GBP 5 million for him in 1982, a world record. He delivered the Copa del Rey in 1982-83 and the Copa de la Liga in 1983, scored 38 goals in 58 games around hepatitis and injury, and on 26 June 1983 produced a goal that Real Madrid's own supporters stood up to applaud. It ended in violence: the 1984 Copa del Rey final against Athletic Bilbao, a headbutt on Miguel Sola, elbows and knees, and a mass brawl in front of King Juan Carlos and 100,000 spectators that left around sixty people injured. Napoli then paid GBP 6.9 million, making him the first footballer ever to set the world transfer record twice.

Naples Belonged to Him

Seventy-five thousand people filled the Stadio San Paolo on 5 July 1984 to watch him do nothing at all except be presented. Napoli had never won an Italian championship; under him they won two, in 1986-87 and 1989-90, along with the Coppa Italia in 1987, the UEFA Cup in 1989 and the 1990 Italian Supercup, taken off Juventus 5-1. He was Serie A's leading scorer in 1987-88 with fifteen, and finished as Napoli's all-time top scorer on 115, a record that survived until Marek Hamsik passed it in 2017. Club president Corrado Ferlaino called him "a coach on the pitch." The same seven years brought 70,000 dollars in fines for missed matches and training, an entrenched cocaine habit, a suspected friendship with the Camorra, a denied son, and in 1991 a fifteen-month ban after a positive test. He left the city in disgrace.

Mexico, 1986

He played every minute of that tournament, scored five goals and made five more, three of them in the opening match against South Korea. He was fouled 53 times, a record, and completed 90 dribbles, three times more than any other player in the competition. He scored or created ten of Argentina's fourteen goals. He dismantled Belgium with two goals in the semi-final, and in the final, with West Germany having clawed back to 2-2, slipped away from Lothar Matthaus in the 84th minute to release Jorge Burruchaga for the winner in front of 115,000 people. The Golden Ball was awarded to him unanimously. Gary Lineker, beaten by him in the quarter-final, said afterwards: "When Diego scored that second goal against us, I felt like applauding. He's the greatest player of all time, by a long way." A fourteen-year-old Zinedine Zidane, watching in France, said only: "He was on another level."

The Long Descent

He captained Argentina to the 1990 final on a ruined ankle, lost 1-0 to West Germany on a late and contested penalty, and wept on the pitch in Rome. Four years later in the United States he scored against Greece and screamed into a pitchside camera, then set up both goals against Nigeria, then failed a test for ephedrine and was expelled from the tournament, blaming an American energy drink. That was the end of it: 91 caps, 34 goals, seventeen years. Management followed, and was mostly unhappy - Deportivo Mandiyu, Racing Club, Argentina at the 2010 World Cup, Al-Wasl in Dubai, Fujairah, Dorados in Mexico, and finally Gimnasia de La Plata, where he was still employed when he died on 25 November 2020, aged 60, at Dique Lujan.

Why Diego Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Maradona because of what he could solve, not what he could think. At 1.65 metres, with a low centre of gravity and a left foot that worked like a hand, he read a crowded pitch faster than the defenders assaulting him; 53 fouls in seven matches is a measure of how often opponents gave up on reading him and resorted to violence instead. Jorge Valdano, who played beside him in 1986, described it in precisely those terms: "Maradona was a technical leader: a guy who resolved all difficulties that may come up on the pitch." His coach Cesar Luis Menotti insisted the gift was not purely inherited: "The beauty of Diego's game has a hereditary element - his natural ease with the ball - but it also owes a lot to his ability to learn." He invented under maximum pressure, in real time, without rehearsal.

The counter-case is substantial and should be stated plainly. This was bodily intelligence, not intellect, and it transferred to nothing else: away from the pitch his judgement was catastrophic, a two-decade sequence of cocaine, missed training, criminal company and a doping expulsion. Even the Hand of God, often praised as cunning, was opportunism rather than insight. He was no strategist and had no interest in the abstractions the word usually implies. What he had was a capacity for spatial improvisation so far ahead of everyone around him that no smaller vocabulary fits. Call it genius of the body, and the claim holds.

What He Left

FIFA named him Player of the Century in 2000, jointly with Pele. Argentina gave him the Konex Diamond in 1990. FourFourTwo placed him first among the hundred greatest players in 2017 and first among World Cup players in 2018. Napoli retired the number 10 shirt in 2000 and renamed their stadium after him nine days after his death; a statue of the Goal of the Century stands at the entrance to the Azteca. Lionel Messi, who has won more, supplied the closing verdict: "Even if I played for a million years, I'd never come close to Maradona."