Half a decade after he died, Diego Maradona's medical team are facing trial in Buenos Aires, as the circumstances surrounding his death are interrogated. His footballing genius made him a cultural icon of stratospheric fame, but why does he continue to transfix Argentinians?
Chapter 1: Why is Diego Maradona's trial significant in Argentina?
When Diego Maradona died in 2020, Argentinians took to the streets. united in both grief and celebration of a footballing legend. But it wasn't long before questions were being asked about the circumstances surrounding his death. Now a long-delayed trial involving his medical team is underway, and Maradona is once again the centre of attention.
Chapter 2: What were the circumstances surrounding Maradona's death?
After a shocking photo taken hours before he died went viral, demonstrators descended on the courthouse demanding justice. So years after his death, why is Maradona's legacy still felt so powerfully by Argentinians? With me today is Marcela Mora y Araujo. She's a journalist in Buenos Aires who translated Diego Maradona's autobiography. Marcella, hi, good to have you on the pod. Thank you.
I think most people would agree that Maradona is one of the best footballers we've ever seen. But when you think about him, often what comes to mind is not just his genius on the pitch, it's what he got up to off the pitch. Now you've actually met him quite a few times. Can you share with us what he was like?
Chapter 3: What was Diego Maradona like off the pitch?
He was incredible. You could almost sense his presence somewhere. Even if you weren't right next to him, it was like the air changed around him. I first met him in the mid-90s. He was presenting a football players' union with all the bad boys of world football, Cantona and George Weah in Paris. They had decided to take on FIFA to complain about,
the conditions under which players were made to play World Cups. He was in a five-star hotel and then he could sort of humming reggae songs. He said, let's go and get some pizza through a kind of back corridor. And then as we got to the front door, he just turned around to the small group of us and said, watch out, there's going to be a lot of people out here.
And suddenly we kind of stepped forward through this gateway into a completely different reality where literally hundreds of people surrounded him, like, you know, flies on honey. And I think the comparison with flies has been made several times since. I've seen it in films and by other authors. And he was just disappeared in the middle of the crowd.
And you could see in his face that he was quite panicked. He was with his then manager, a guy called Guillermo Coppola, who stopped a pink Rolls Royce that happened to be driving by, a sort of open-roofed Rolls Royce, and whispered something in the driver's ear. Maradona and him hopped on and drove away. And it was quite extraordinary. And that was my very first sort of proper encounter with him.
But he was a man of contradictions when it came to his personality as well. Unbelievably talented, a genius, clever, funny, smart, but he could also be a bit nasty and vindictive.
I don't know about vindictive particularly, but he had an incredible memory. He remembered faces, people, and I don't think he forgave easily. You know, if he felt he'd been crossed by someone, he didn't forget it. He was incredibly generous as well. So a lot of his teammates, especially, and, you know, people close to him will give a...
lavish examples of his generosity you know by someone's father a car he organized charity games and so on but at the same time you know in that very same trip where i first met him he was due to play in bosnia in a charity match and and actually just overslept after a sort of
night of heavy partying and his entourage, because he always had an entourage, put a lot of pressure on the organisers of the charity game to book a charter private plane. He subsequently spent a lot of time in Cuba, a country which he said he loved. He had the Che Guevara's face tattooed on his leg. And at the same time,
In Cuba, he enjoyed a very privileged life that wasn't at all like most Cubans enjoy. He had access to the best foods. He had a direct satellite link to all the best football in the world. I often think that very contradictory nature is what made him so appealing. It was like the most human of traits, so everybody could identify with it. And he was acutely aware of his contradictions and often...
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Chapter 4: How did Maradona's career lead to international stardom?
No one can deny that football genius. Can you remind us of that path on the pitch that took him to international football superstardom?
His skills and his brilliance were on TV even when he was a child, a tiny child. He would do kipi-yapi at halftime and before games at his club. And there's a very famous clip of him from those days saying his dream is to win the World Cup.
He then moved to Boca Juniors, where he became the player that represented all the values of the Boca Juniors club, and then moved to Barcelona in 1981 in a $6 million transfer deal. I remember... Well, because I was a child at the time and there was a TV series, an American TV series of a nuclear man whose sort of nuclear powered limbs had cost six million dollars.
It was called the Six Million Dollar Man. And we we used to boast that Argentina had its own six million dollar man. In Barcelona, he did incredibly well, but also started running into trouble with authorities, perhaps also started getting into trouble with his substance abuse, specifically cocaine.
And then he moved from Barcelona to Naples in what was widely regarded as a shocking move because Naples was
a poor forgotten club in the south of Italy and the super clubs were in Italy at that time, the big clubs, but he felt that this is where he would be able to make a difference and had an incredible sense of loyalty and this struggle of the oppressed that he brought to Naples where he is still to this day considered one of the most emblematic and important, not just players of the club, but
People of Naples. The pinnacle of his international fame really reached its height when he finally achieved that dream that he'd mentioned as a little boy on TV of winning the World Cup for Argentina in 1986. And as Menotti, who was one of his first managers in Argentina, liked to say that 1986 World Cup, there was a sort of elite of football royalty. There were a lot of big names.
But among those princes, there was only one king. Maradona stood up above the rest.
What would you say that he represented for Argentinians?
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Chapter 5: What controversies surrounded Maradona's later career?
So I think Diego Maradona was a very divisive character and represented a lot of different things to different people. Firstly, he represented the second World Cup win in 1986, which is hugely important because the 1978 World Cup was won under quite difficult social conditions with a military dictatorship in place.
He also represented to people around the world, not just Argentina, the rags to riches, the hope, the fact that you can be born in incredibly limiting, unhappy circumstances, in poverty, and yet become the absolute and arguable best at something.
Marcelo, he was widely admired, of course, but you've already referenced some of the drug abuse that was taking place when he was in Spain. There was quite a lot of controversy around that throughout the later years of his career.
Yes, he did everything in excess. He was a man of no moderation. You know, he'd have five bottles of champagne, he'd eat three steaks, he'd order 15 pizzas. Alcohol and cocaine were a problem as a sort of young adult, which are perhaps not surprisingly, the substances that abound in South America, sort of elite circles and in football.
And then in later life, it was perhaps more prescribed medications. This sort of extreme behavior came hand in hand with a lot of fun loving partying. You know, he was friends with rock stars. I went to a birthday of his in 2005 and it was live beamed on TV. So he lived in the public eye always right to his very last days. Everything was documented. Everything was filmed.
Everything was broadcast live. The most intimate details of his life would either leak or be played out on TV channels. So it was really a kind of impossible life to inhabit, the one that, on the one hand, he created for himself, and on the other, we as a society provided for him. I think there's a sports psychologist in Argentina called Marcelo Rofe, who says we are addicted to Maradona.
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Chapter 6: How did Argentina react to Maradona's death?
We as a society have over-consumed him. And I think that's a very interesting thought.
It's well documented, his drug abuse, but he was actually banned for 15 months for failed drug tests on two occasions. Once for recreational cocaine in 1991 and then quite famously performance enhancing drugs were found in his system at the World Cup in 1994. I think many of us can bring to mind pictures of him where he is clearly struggling with both his weight and with addiction.
In 2000 he was in intensive care in a coma after an overdose from cocaine. In 2004 he reportedly had two heart attacks in just one month. And then in 2020, he'd had the surgery, he was at home, and then he died due to a cardiac arrest. It was such a surreal time right around the world because it was at the height of COVID. And you were there in Argentina at the time. What was it like?
It was an extraordinary moment. It was very sudden. People just started flocking to the streets and marching towards the centre of the city. There's a monument called the Obelisk, which is traditionally where football fans go to celebrate football triumphs. The president at the time said he'd offered the presidential palace, the pink house, as it's known, for the coffin to be displayed.
And suddenly it was the first true massive outing throughout the whole of 2020 because of lockdown. And football had been suspended as well. So there was an incredible sense of the terraces. It was like the return to match day. There were people with scarves, there were songs being chanted, and it was incredibly moving.
A massive, massive flocking of crowds towards the coffin until it all went sort of slightly Maradonian. mayhemmy and there was some confusion as to which way the crowds would go, how long the coffin would be there for, where it would go to be buried, the police, literally like when it goes off at a football match.
This didn't last very long and eventually the coffin drove throughout the whole city and there was just silent people all along the motorways and standing on the sides of the streets, weeping. It was literally incredibly moving. I remember my mother watching on the news and saying, this is just the most beautiful, spontaneous manifestation of popular support.
And finally, he was buried in a cemetery under the last ray of sun of the day in a very, very small, intimate moment just with his immediate family and friends. So it was quite a remarkable moment and I don't think anyone who was here would forget it. The sadness, the joy, the euphoria, the mayhem, the respectful silence. It was an incredible, incredible moment.
So we've looked at the complications of Maradona's stratospheric fame and the national outpouring of grief prompted by his death. Next, why questions are being asked about how he died.
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