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Diego Maradona was perhaps the greatest player to ever kick a soccer ball. And yet it only goes so far to explain the worldwide outpouring of grief when he died this week.
Some argue that Brazilian Pelé has won more trophies, or that fellow Argentinean Lionel Messi and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo have approached comparable skill levels.
But there isn’t one like Maradona – “el pibe de oro” or “the golden kid” – who rose from the poor barrios of Buenos Aires to become a true international icon.
“He transcended sports,” Jon Smith, a prominent British sports agent who represented Maradona between 1986 and 1991, told NBC News.
“He went to very dark corners,” he added, “but history will be kind to Diego because his talent was so supreme and he never lost that desire to help the unfortunate.”
Maradona was buried Thursday after spending the day in state at Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential palace. Crowds began to queue at dawn to view his body, some of them becoming unruly when police attempted to end the 12-hour visitation period before the wake. Fans threw bottles and stones, and riot officers responded with rubber bullets, gas and water cannons.
It was a feverish moment during three days of mourning for the nation of 45 million people. Tens of thousands of people have already taken to the streets, leaving flowers and messages in Maradona’s childhood home and the former team, Boca Juniors.
Pope Francis of Argentinian origin joined in the tributes. And the French newspaper L’Équipe stood out among the front pages of the world, its headline declaring: “God is dead”.
It is impossible to think of another sportsman whose death would elicit a similar global response, that of a footballer, rock star and religious leader united in one. Maradona was revered as a genius who graced what is by far the most popular sport in the world. He was also deeply human, an imperfect hero who contrasts with the athletes who often define the modern game.
The legend of Maradona is all the more powerful because he accomplished something of a storybook prophecy in his land – only for that very success that brought about his downfall.
The Maradona myth has its roots in the 1880s, when the British – who had a great influence over Argentina – introduced the young South American nation to football.
British tactics relied on “strength” and “physical might”, but a new style of Latin influence quickly emerged in the country that was “individualistic, unruly”, “nimble and skillful,” wrote the Argentine anthropologist Eduardo P. Archetti in a 2001 Paper.
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The spirit of the Argentinian game revolved around the idea of the “pibe” – a scruffy street kid playing on the cramped, unpaved terrain among the slum buildings, Archetti said. Maradona became the full epitome of that image, his chunky 5ft 5in frame and lightning skills coupled with rough edges that never smoothed out even as he reached a global superstar.
The culmination of this myth-making came at the 1986 World Cup, which he won almost on his own with a series of virtuoso performances. The quarter-final was against England, just four years after the UK defeated Argentina in the Falklands War.
Maradona had defended her country’s claim to the disputed Falkland Islands, or Islas Malvinas. His leftist politics saw him befriended leaders such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba, whose face Maradona had tattooed on his body alongside that of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara.
This Falklands backdrop gave the Argentina-England game a tribal and political edge. It was so much more than football when Maradona scored twice, first with his infamous “hand of God” – kicking the ball into the net, without the referee noticing – then with maybe l ‘one of the greatest individual goals of all time, jumping half the England squad.
At that point, with his lonely raid through the English ranks, Maradona was that street urchin again, embodying the Argentinian fantasy of a brave and oppressed outsider taking revenge against a former colonial power, Archetti said.
It catapulted him to a new level of stardom.
It was also “the game that helps destroy his life because it puts him on the level of a god”, Tim Vickery, expert and journalist covering South American football, Told the podcast the name of the brazilian jersey Wednesday. “No one should be put on the level of a god. We just weren’t made for it, we’re human – and it sure wasn’t made for it.”
In Naples between 1984 and 1991 he produced the best football of his career. He also admitted to feeling suffocated.
“It’s a great city but I can hardly breathe,” he said at the time. “I want to be free to walk around. I’m a boy like any other.”
Smith, who wrote the book “The Deal: Inside the World of a Super-Agent”, recalls having to get special permission from the city police to have Maradona put on the red lights because mad fans were assaulting and shaking regularly his Ferrari collection.
He developed a cocaine habit and his reputation was tarnished by reported ties to the city’s Camorra crime syndicate. He would then fail three drug tests: the first in 1991 which ended his disgraced Naples fairy tale, the last in 1997 marking the end of his career at 37.
After his retirement, he was given a suspended prison term for shooting journalists with an air rifle. For years, he refused to acknowledge that he was the father of his son, later becoming a stranger to his two daughters. And he was charged with domestic violence.
He had two gastric bypass surgeries after putting on weight, and at least one heart attack before the one that killed him at the age of 60. Two weeks earlier he was released from hospital, and straight to an alcohol recovery clinic, after surgery for bleeding in his brain.
In all of this, he rarely avoided his mistakes. Returning to La Bombonera, the Boca Juniors stadium, to say goodbye in 2001, he told the crowd he hoped his mistakes hadn’t marred his impact on football.
“La pelota no se mancha”, he told them: the ball does not show dirt.
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