Diego Maradona

About Diego Maradona

Diego Maradona made his league debut for Argentinos Juniors in 1976, days before his sixteenth birthday, and the rest of world football spent the next two decades trying to keep up. Born in October 1960 and raised in Villa Fiorito, on the edge of Buenos Aires, he was the most famous teenager in Argentina before he had left his first club. The career that followed crossed three countries and seven spells, and almost every one of them carried a story people still argue about.

Argentinos Juniors gave him five years, from 1976 to 1981, and he repaid them by turning a modest club from La Paternal into a place everyone came to watch. In 1981 he moved to Boca Juniors, the club he had always wanted to play for, and his one season there ended with a league title in the Metropolitano. That was enough to send him to Europe.

Barcelona signed him in 1982, but his two years at Camp Nou were broken up by illness and a severe ankle injury from a brutal tackle, and he left in 1984 with the sense of something unfinished. The move that followed defined him. Napoli, from a city that felt looked down upon by the industrial north of Italy, gave him the stage he needed. Between 1984 and 1991 he led them to their first two Serie A titles and to a UEFA Cup, and in Naples he became something closer to a patron saint than a footballer.

In the middle of that Italian chapter came Mexico 1986. As captain of Argentina he won the World Cup, and the quarter-final against England produced both the handball he called the hand of God and, minutes later, the slalom through half a team that is still voted the greatest goal ever scored. Four years later he took Argentina to another final, in Italy.

The end of the Napoli years was messy, with a suspension that kept him away from the game. He came back with Sevilla in 1992, went home to Newell's Old Boys in Rosario for a brief spell, and finished where his heart was, with a second stint at Boca from 1995 to 1997. He died in November 2020, and the grief in Buenos Aires and Naples was on a scale few athletes have ever provoked.

On paper he was a midfielder, which is accurate and also completely insufficient. He played as a number ten in the old sense: low centre of gravity, a left foot that could do anything, and a gift for carrying a team on his back. His nicknames tell the story on their own, from Pelusa in his youth to El Diez and, for the faithful, D10S.