Diego Maradona Was a Deeply Human Superstar

The Argentinian soccer legend married technical brilliance to wild idiosyncrasy, leaving a legacy almost unparalleled in sports.
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Diego Maradona of Argentina celebrates a goal against the Republic of Korea during the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico City.David Cannon / Getty Images

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There’s a scene toward the beginning of Asif Kapadia’s documentary, Diego Maradona, where Maradona is standing in some dusty locker room, somewhere in Argentina, waiting to be interviewed. It’s the early ‘80s: He hasn’t moved to Europe yet, hasn’t won the World Cup, hasn’t quite become El Diego. But he’s started to score goals, started to make some money, started to realize he is, in fact, hot shit.

At a squat 5-foot-5, all legs and not much else, he’s wearing a fur coat, brownish gray with black stripes, big enough to fit someone who plays the other kind of football. Rumors have begun to circulate about a lucrative move to a club in Europe, and so a reporter asks him about it. Maradona says he doesn’t care about money, then the reporter goes on to suggest that, well, the leopard on your back might make some people think otherwise. Oh, this thing? Maradona responds: “I needed something cozy, so I bought this.

Diego Maradona in Paris, September 05, 1981.

Gabriel Duval / Getty Images

On Wednesday, the kid inside that coat passed away at the age of 60, from a heart attack at his home, back in Buenos Aires. With his passing, we’ve lost one of the last human superstars—a one-in-one global icon who inspired impossible mythmaking and irrational religious devotion, but always let us know who he was.

Maradona’s career has taken on a Michael Jordan-esque aura of inevitability, and how could it not? First, he won the 1986 World Cup with Argentina. And really, despite there being 10 other guys on the field, he won it. In the quarterfinals, Argentina took down England, the self-styled forefathers of football. The first goal was the famous “Hand of God,” Diego slyly punching the ball into the net. As he said, “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” Ref missed it, no instant replay—the goal stands. Maradona would later say that the goal was “a nice feeling of symbolic revenge” for the Falklands War.

Then, four minutes later, as if to make up for his sin, Maradona scored what FIFA called “The Goal of the Century”—an irresistible, syncopated, slalom through the entire England side. “[W]hen I got to the area they surrounded me and I had no space,” he said. “Therefore, I had to continue the play and finish it myself.” It was as if he knew that he had to score this goal after scoring that goal, to level the cosmic scales and layer the game with another level of immediate historic drama. He couldn’t just score another goal; it had to be the greatest goal that anyone had ever scored.

He then scored twice in the 2-0 semifinal win against Belgium before a 3-2 victory over West Germany in the final. He scored five goals and assisted five more at the tournament; no other player has ever contributed to that many goals in World Cup history. It’s the best-ever performance at the biggest tournament in all of sports.

Then, almost immediately, he one-upped himself the following season with his club team, Napoli. At the time, no team from the southern peninsula of Italy had ever won a title. Amidst the economic struggles of the south in the late 80s, Neapolitans were frequently harassed by Northerners. (At stadiums in Rome, Milan, and Turin, Napoli fans would get greeted with pleasantries such as, “you are the shame of Italy,” “you are the sewer of Italy,” and “hello cholera sufferers, wash them with fire.”) Maradona, who’d joined the team from gold-plated Barcelona, dragged them to the top. “A rolling series of impromptu street parties and festivities broke out contagiously across the city in a round-the-clock carnival which ran for over a week,” wrote David Goldblatt of the season, in his definitive history of world soccer, The Ball Is Round. “The world was turned upside down. The Neapolitans held mock funerals for Juventus and Milan, burning their coffins, their death notices announcing 'May 1987, the other Italy has been defeated. A new empire is born.'”

He’d accomplished everything he ever could—and yet he’d just turned 27. In both of his homes, Naples and Argentina, he’d become a god who could fulfill the dreams of ordinary people with a flick of his boot. The pressure eventually got to him; it would’ve gotten to anyone. As Kapadia’s documentary expertly lays out, being Diego Maradona was suffocating. Maradona said he would go out every night from Sunday through Wednesday, do a bunch of drugs, and then spend the next two days “cleansing” himself to get ready for the weekend’s matches. For someone who played the game with such an infectious, creative joy, he seemed to fall out of love with the sport while in Italy.

It all came to a head with another impossible-to-script moment: Argentina played Italy in the semifinals of the 1990 World Cup ... in Naples. The game went to a penalty shootout, and Maradona converted the winning penalty. To some Neapolitans, this was a betrayal. One newspaper ran the headline: “Lucifer lives in Naples.” The press turned on him, and his drug use became a much bigger story. He played one more year at Napoli, one unspectacular season back in Spain, and a couple more in Argentina. He played two games at the 1994 World Cup before getting kicked out for testing positive for a performance-enhancing stimulant. He never played another game for Argentina—really, never made a significant impact at the club level again. His last goal came in the 1994 World Cup against Greece, in 4-0 win at Foxborough Stadium in Massachusetts. After scoring, he ran over to theTV camera, screaming like a banshee, looking like a demon, ready to tear your face off ... and then the screen went black, forever. There was no ending, no proof that he couldn’t do it just anymore—just that bug-eyed face, suspended in amber.

Diego Maradona of Argentina celebrates a win against Russia at the 1990 World Cup in Naples.

David Cannon / Getty Images

Maradonna continued to struggle with drug use in retirement, and ballooned in size, all of a sudden bearing little resemblance to the lithe, jaunty magician who turned the world on its head. The less said about his managerial career, the better; at the 2010 World Cup, he built a staid, boring Argentina team around his heir, Lionel Messi. They were drubbed out in the quarterfinals. But even after his career was over, Diego stayed Diego—leading an anti-George Bush rally in Buenos Aires in 2005, dancing wildly in the stands at the 2018 World Cup, wearing a fishbowl on his head while sitting on the sidelines during a match in Argentina. He didn’t live on as some kind of sage passer-on of knowledge or cutting TV analyst. Instead, he just popped up every couple months, doing or saying something that inevitably turned into a meme. The conqueror became the clown.

Most modern superstars inspire a kind of removed reverence—a greatness you can’t understand but you can admire from afar. That’s Michael Jordan, it’s Peyton Manning, it’s Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. They become monoliths of excellence—people who can’t be defined in any other way beyond their devotion and utter command of their craft. When was the last time you saw Roger Federer self-sabotage?

Maradonna, though, inspired something else: people loved him or hated him (or loved and hated him) because they knew exactly who he was. He reached the pinnacle of his sport while being the lovable, outspoken doofus who liked to have way too much fun—in spite of those qualities, but probably because of them, too. He was a complete mess; he was the best soccer player in the world. And through it all, he remained the kid in the fur coat—the one who just wanted to be cozy, and found a remarkable, completely out-of-proportion way to solve the problem.