What is it that makes someone the best in the world at what they do?
At one time, between 1984 and 1988, Diego Maradona was peerless. From the tributes being paid on his death at the age of 60 (and what a life he packed into three score years), it appears that his life off the field had a detrimental effect on his game. It involved drugs, affairs, the Neapolitan mafia, boardroom politics and the perils of being very famous.
In the chronology of football, he took over from Johan Cruyff and gave his crown to Marco van Basten. Both Dutchmen left an imprint on the game in the low country and around the world, but eventually Cruyff was chucked out of Barcelona, where he had masterminded a revolution, and van Basten was kicked out of football through injury. Today, the top players – Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe – are protected both by the rules on bad tackles and the way the game has evolved to be more about turnovers and pressing than the art of a good tackle. Yet the world’s best defender, Dutchman Virgil van Dijk, could put in a tackle should he see fit.
All of these players had, or have, their exploits beamed around the world. In Pele’s day, fans glimpsed his glories on TV every four years or had to pay for the privilege of watching Brazil in the flesh. Pele, who himself was ‘kicked out of’ the 1966 World Cup, never moved to Europe, in much the same way that Elvis Presley stayed in the United States for his career, never gigging in England.
Michael Jackson, however, played Wembley Stadium. The self-styled King of Pop was a global popstar in the way Prince, Madonna and Bono also were (and, to a lesser degree with the final two, are). Like Madonna and U2 today, Maradona became a heritage brand, still someone whose opinion mattered. Because of his reputation – the rags to riches story blotted by excess and ignorance of the cult of celebrity – he was even more famous than Pele. He played in Spain, Italy and Argentina, starring in four World Cups when that tournament’s commercial appeal had not been usurped by the UEFA Champions League.
In 1982, when he was sent off against Brazil in the second group stage, Maradona was wearing the number 10 shirt even though the other numbers had been allocated alphabetically (Osvaldo Ardiles famously wore 1). In Mexico in 1986, having hardly played for his national team, Maradona was the star who won the trophy almost on his own. At Italia ’90, Maradona implored Italians to get behind Argentina in the final against West Germany even though they had knocked Italy out of their home tournament in the semi-finals.
In between 1990 and 1994, however, Maradona was banned for recreational drug use, returned to play in Argentina and became a fixture in the tabloids, which no longer respected an omerta due to alleged links with the Camorra. This may well become clearer when Guillem Balague brings out his biography due next autumn, since he might have an easier ride when it comes to libel laws.
In Argentina, three days of mourning was declared. Jonathan Wilson’s book Angels With Dirty Faces, about both football and politics in Argentina, devotes entire chapters to Maradona’s travels and rule-breaking. Writing in the Guardian, Wilson compared him to Cruyff but also someone ‘draped in symbolic importance…a quasi-messianic figure’ who took charge of Argentina at the 2010 World Cup, where Germany beat them 4-0 in the quarter-finals.
Receiving the news that Diego Maradona had died, L’Equipe wrote ‘Dieu est mort’ while The New York Times praised his ‘roguish cunning and extravagant control’. In the Times, Henry Winter recalled his greatest hits, having reported on the 1990 World Cup, and how Maradona ‘was the greatest player I have ever had the privilege to report on…If you love football, you love Maradona’.
He’s one of those players who would draw a paying audience even as he warms up and, indeed, a video of him doing just that was doing the rounds in the hours after his passing was announced. Ditto a four-minute eulogy from Gary Lineker, taken from the BT Sport coverage of the Champions League, where he recounted Maradona’s skill of whacking a football up high in the air 13 times in a row, barely moving a yard, during one of those warm-ups. When Lineker and his Barcelona team-mates tried to match the record, they could only manage three.
The Times’ Chief Sports Writer Matt Dickinson, who also has a book out in the spring about Maradona, used the word ‘compelling’ and calling his subject ‘football’s most epic life…The closer I got to him, the more I was transfixed,’ he writes, even as he was twice stood up when he had flown to Argentina for some research. Dickinson writes this off as part of his ‘outrageousness, rebellion, fearlessness’ whose life was ‘the aftermath of a series of wild parties’. I’d call it rudeness and hubristic, with no self-control.
But such is the nature of genius, which does not run on Greenwich Mean Time.
What makes the best truly the best? The usual: talent, luck, nurture, genetics. Usain Bolt benefits from being taller than the average sprinter while Michael Johnson was interested in marginal gains to improve his races. Those who threw or hit various balls or pucks – Joe DiMaggio, the Manning brothers Peyton and Eli, Tom Brady, Wayne Gretsky – are still spoken of in awe because their talents were harnessed by great coaches in great teams. Tiger Woods, Andre Agassi and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, all had help from their dads; Andy and Jamie Murray, of course, learned how to play tennis in Florida but with the blessing of their mum.
Yet the Murrays don’t represent the UK, or Scotland, in the way that Maradona represented Argentina. Michael Jackson (driven like his brothers by a megalomaniacal father) never represented America, although his presence on MTV gave a platform for the likes of Prince, NWA and Jay-Z to become important figures in the hitherto mainly Caucasian cultural conversation.
Consider this: Maradona was the heir to Eva Peron; Pele was the spokesperson for a little pill that kept you scoring all night.
As in his stunning documentary on racing driver and Brazilian icon Ayrton Senna, Asif Kapadia places Maradona in the context of his time. Diego Maradona looked at both sides of the star: Diego, the boy from the slums; and Maradona, the name on the back of the shirt which billions admired and which brought the vultures out.
When ranking footballers, as with musicians, it pays to remember the context. Miles Davis and John Coltrane pushed the American music of jazz to new territories, while Aretha Franklin’s death was marked with notices that she took the church to the Hot 100 (but stayed very much in the church, as the recent footage from her Amazing Grace album sessions shows). It took Atlantic Records to nurture her talent and market her to America, much as Epic Records picked up the baton from Motown and used technology to make Michael Jackson the biggest entertainer the world will ever see.
Now everyone owns superstars. Beyonce doesn’t belong to Tennessee; she belongs to the black diaspora and her art reflects that. Precisely because she controls the narrative, we know only what she chooses us to know. With Maradona, as with Paul Gascoigne (who looks haunted today), there was no technology available for fans to react instantly to his every move, so instead the press were a constant presence in his life.
Maradona, who was only at his peak for four years, was like a musician whose rush of creativity would trap him in that era. Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds era, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era, Stevie Wonder’s run of albums in the early-to-mid-1970s, Michael Jackson’s three Quincy Jones productions (Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad), Eminem’s first three albums; I see much merit in discussing music and football together, with individuals operating as a frontman in a team. After all, what use is David Bowie without the Spiders from Mars, Stevie without the boffins with whom he developed the technology to make his albums, the studio musicians who made Thriller with Jackson, Dr Dre to mentor Eminem? And that is before noting the impact of Brian Epstein and George Martin on bringing Lennon & McCartney’s art to the masses. Paul McCartney is the English Maradona, I would argue.
Maradona, taught on the streets, beloved by the masses looking for a hero, already looks out of time in the era of social media, a VHS hero in a Netflix world. The tributes and arguments piled up in the days after his passing. Channel 4’s All4 service made the Maradona documentary free to air for UK viewers so they could marvel at the tragedy of Diego Maradona.
In November 2020 the journalist Matthew Parris brought out a compendium of tales about great lives which have been discussed on the Radio 4 show of the same name. He called it Fracture because he noted that genius was fostered by trauma. John Lennon lost his aunt, Paul McCartney his mother Mary, and figures as disparate as Marie Curie, Carl Jung and Vladimir Lenin were all fractured by their childhoods. Does this confer greatness upon them? Plenty of fractured kids grow up to become fractured adults who are incapable of greatness.
A happy child who lived opposite Ajax Football Club, Johan Cruyff played in North America (like Pele) as well as Europe. He then turned Barcelona into a dynasty through management and administration but eventually put a few noses out of joint there. When he passed away, another legacy artist whose reputation had grown like some latter-day Nick Drake or Vincent van Gogh, Jonathan Wilson noted that nobody had changed how people think about the game more than him.
Maradona was, in his prime, greater than Cruyff. His greatness came from the poverty he suffered in the slums of Argentina, who turned him into a cipher and weren’t able to stop Diego’s impulses. It’s just Diego being Diego. The best are the best because we say they are the best, no matter their flaws.
In today’s micromanaged football world, superstars use Instagram, Netflix and corporate branding deals to gain riches – and in notable cases take a stand for political action. Messi and Ronaldo are great players without question but will they be held in the same esteem as Pele and Maradona? Or is it because we, the fans, love them because we want a second coming of players who brought our dads and grandads (and mums and grandmas) the same excitement to our lives all these decades on?
More than mere footballers, like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi – neither of whom could do it on a wet Tuesday night under the lights – Maradona and Pele are secular saints whose talents brought joy through football. Now the final whistle has blown, like so many past stars, for El Diego.