The Argentine footballer has embodied the best and the worst of modern football better than any other. An exceptional player, he brought Argentina to the top of world football and will remain as one of the best of all time. He died this Wednesday, November 25 from a heart attack in Buenos Aires. He was 60 years old.
« You can’t imagine how hard it is to be Maradona », He confided to me one evening, while we were tasting pasta in a restaurant facing the Seine, in the company of his wife Claudia. A moment of rare intimacy with one of the most popular men in the world, known and admired in all places on the planet. It was at the beginning of 1995, when I had the privilege of organizing his visit to Paris on behalf of France Football magazine. Three days and three nights of madness which were enough to understand indeed what Maradona’s daily life could have both exhilarating and trying …
► To (re) see: Maradona is 60 years old! The sports café on October 30, 2020
34 years old at the time, he had not yet hung up his boots but he was suspended by Fifa following a positive test for ephedrine during the 1994 World Cup. While waiting to be able to replay, he was ‘was about to begin an experience as a coach. He was still at the height of his fame, despite an end of his career thwarted by numerous incidents. He had left Europe for an Argentina who forgave him all his escapades, seeing in him only the idol which had carried very high the colors of his native country.
World champion in Mexico in 1986, with a team that no one believed in. A World Cup where he captured all eyes and all attention. Alone Skin, in 1970, could claim such individual achievement in this competition. With of course a match that would go down in history, the quarter-final against England (2-1) with two legendary goals, one at the end of a slalom where he reviewed half of the opposing team, and another hand-marked without the referee’s knowledge. The “hand of God,” he will say. Two goals like the two sides of a single player, a mixture of talent and cunning.
Finalist four years later, in Italy, with an even less efficient formation and with, against him, the hostility of a large part of the Italians, exacerbated after the elimination of the local team at the end of a shooting session with the goal of madness in the overheated atmosphere of the San Paolo stadium in Naples, Diego’s garden. And in 1994, for what would be his last World Cup, called for the help of a team without benchmarks which had almost not qualified, Maradona had further sublimated in two magnificent matches before an error of his physical trainer staff, who gave him a food supplement containing a prohibited substance, did not hasten his exit …
A genius without limits
For Argentina at the time, Diego Maradona was the symbol of success in a country that was trying to get out of the worst moment in its history, between a bloody military dictatorship and a democracy failing to assert itself and in the country its former prosperity. This kid born in 1960 in a poor shanty town, with a father who toiled from morning to night for a meager salary and a mother who worked miracles to support a large family, very quickly discovered that with the ball to the feet, he was becoming a magician. . His exceptional talent allowed him, as a child, to lift his family out of poverty and to understand that all his wishes could be granted as long as the unique relationship between his left foot and the ball remained exceptional. And as his appetite for life seemed inexhaustible, he never set any limits …
The Argentine championship having proved too narrow for a genius of his caliber, he soon discovered Europe. First in Barcelona where, despite the presence of Argentinian coach Cesar Luis Menotti, Maradona and his troop have never managed to blend in with the too civilized and bourgeois life that the club demanded of him. Between a hepatitis and a serious injury, the young Argentinian star discovered there the forbidden pleasures of drugs.
Two years later, he accepted an astonishing challenge: to go to Naples. A club that did not exist on the Italian football charts, but which, thanks to the power of the city’s mafia networks, had cash that could satisfy the growing appetite of the player and his clan. Seven years of madness followed, during which, thanks to Maradona, the club became a winning machine: two Italian championships, one UEFA Cup, one Cup and one Italian Supercup. With their idol, the Neapolitans finally invite themselves to the table of upscale clubs in the north of the country, AC Milan, Juventus and other Inter Milan … It’s much more than football, it’s the revenge of Italy from below against that from above. And that, the Neapolitans will never forget.
Leave Naples and “die”
But the almost religious madness which surrounds him in Naples ends up becoming heavy. The links between the club and the Camorra, in which he finds himself trapped, the countless solicitations of which he is the subject, the dimension of father of a family that he acquires with the birth of his daughters Dalma and Gianinna, the status of best player of the world who follows his consecration in Mexico, everything pushes him to dream of a slightly calmer environment. In 1989, Bernard Tapie, then boss of OM, made him sparkle and Maradona already saw himself in a villa facing the sea, far from the tumult of the Neapolitan streets. But his club and its powerful supporters do not want to hear anything, and Italy is less inclined to turn a blind eye to the player’s deviations after the humiliation of the 1990 World Cup. A few months later, Maradona gave positive for cocaine during the match. a control in the league. First suspension, first descent into hell with a well-publicized arrest for drug consumption in Buenos Aires, first cures, and first return to football, in Seville, in 1992, a path of redemption that will still stop, we have it said, in the summer of 1994 …
Maradona will still have the strength to play again at Boca Juniors, the club of his heart, whose colors he had worn in the early 1980s, before leaving for Europe. But without ever finding the summits. A last match in 1997, at the age of 37, then a farewell match in 2001, punctuated a life which became more and more chaotic, between drugs, alcohol, overweight which forced him to submit in 2005 to a gastric bypass operation, more and more frequent stays in clinics …
Personal but also family drift, since Maradona, who had long made his wife Claudia, whom he had met in adolescence, and their two daughters, a bulwark, ends up falling out with them. His sentimental life becomes difficult to follow; and after a few years of denial, he finally recognized a dozen natural children.
In this context, football returns episodically in his life, with periods as a coach in various clubs, in Argentina, in Mexico, more extensively in the United Arab Emirates … And even in the national team, with a position of a coach who stops abruptly after a heavy defeat against Germany at the 2010 World Cup.
An unmanageable character
Those who today are used to seeing football stars surrounded by communication experts, who manage the content of their social networks and organize their interviews with a market strategy, would be surprised to see freedom of speech who has always accompanied Diego Maradona. Knowing that his voice carried, he avoided any subject, whether it concerns politics, society or football bodies, which he has often attacked. In 1995, he was at the origin of the creation of a real world union of footballers. Its links with leaders of the Latin American left, such as Cuban Fidel Castro or Venezuelan Hugo Chavez, are growing closer and closer.
Diego Maradona no longer has the magic at the end of his left foot, but he remains an essential character. The cinema, the song, the books, take hold of his life and give it an additional dimension, that of the immortal myth, whereas the end, inevitably, approaches. With old age, undoubtedly aggravated by the effects of the excesses of an unbridled life, we discover a less exuberant Maradona, and the Covid-19 epidemic will not help matters. His rare public appearances show a man as popular as ever, arousing songs and enthusiasm from his fans. But his walk becomes hesitant, his words confused, his memory failing.
► To (re) listen: Diego Maradona: the story of a football legend
It was difficult, it is clear, to be Maradona every day. Very difficult. His admirers, all those who have ever seen this child with the incomparable left foot, must now learn to live without him. It will probably be just as difficult …
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