THE MARQUEE
Diego Maradona is as much about the football god as it is the era in which he rose and fell
Diego Maradona takes us back to a time when the beautiful game wasn’t so pretty
Not long ago, Belgian and Napoli forward Dries Mertens told the press how his upstairs neighbour, a 75 year old woman, will praise or admonish him — the latter in the form of a slap on the face — depending on how he’d played the weekend before.
Mertens takes it on the chin. After all, he reasons, Neopolitans can’t help it: “Football in Italy is like a wonderful sickness because people are infected with this love for the sport from childhood to old age.”
There is one former Napoli star, however, for whom this wonderful sickness nearly proved fatal.
Diego Maradona, the short, bushy- haired and often vulgar Argentine forward still considered one of the greatest footballers in history — his nickname was literally “God” — spent seven chaotic years with Napoli between 1984 and 1991. It was a career-defining period in which he won two league titles and a World Cup with Argentina before struggling with drug addiction and, for petty footballing reasons, the disaffection of his adopted country.
Those seven years also defined an entire footballing era, and it is beautifully captured in Asif Kapadia’s captivating, gut-punch documentary, Diego Maradona, recently aired on HBO and available through Crave.
The straightforward title hints at Maradona’s dual identity: One is affable and private ( Diego), the other grotesque and public (Maradona). It’s alluded to in the film by his former trainer, Fernando Signorini, but Maradona’s inner conflict also reflects that of football itself. As wonderful as it is sick, the game is represented by the conflicting passions of the Neapolitans who seem less interested in embracing Maradona than they are in crushing him to death.
While the film follows the familiar contours of the biographical documentary, it also unwittingly records — in stunning archival footage discovered in Buenos Aires after lying dormant for 30 years — the last moments of football in the pre- modern era. It’s messy, corrupt, sometimes violent and also, at times, glorious.
This was football before the rise of television contracts that poured money into the sport, before the Bosman ruling gave out- ofcontract players far more bargaining power, and before the breakaway of the Premier League in England provided a model of how to wring the most cash from supporters — seismic events that have given the sport, as it’s played today, an inescapable commercial gloss.
This was an era when Italian football was king; one I remember growing up in Toronto, walking along College St., hearing Neapolitan music flow out of niche Italian record stores that might have one or two team photos on the wall of the Italian team that won the 1982 World Cup. The football banner familiar at many grounds today — Against Modern Football — is a call to return to this period, and both Maradona and Napoli were at its heart.
As Kapadia told Jonathan Liew this past June in The Independent, “Naples became the centrepiece because it definitely felt like to me there was a before and after.” He’s referring to Maradona’s life, but he could be talking about football itself.
On the one hand, Diego Maradona helps strip this era of some its romance, both on the pitch and off it. Playing for Napoli, Maradona is swatted in the face, elbowed, sent to the ground in a mangled heap in tackles that would earn a red card today. The abuse helped him raise his game to an absurd level in his title-winning 1985-86 season, and arguably prepared him for a gruelling World Cup ‘86 in Mexico — one many believe he won single-handedly — but it also stoked Maradona’s signature combativeness off the pitch.
Maradona faced constant pressure from supporters and haters alike, surrounded by swarming mobs in public who simultaneously venerated him as a saint and condemned him as a serial philanderer (which he was, irresponsibly and unrepentantly). When his transfer request following his first championship with Napoli was denied by the club president, his efforts at indignation in speaking to the press come off as desperation: He’s trapped, pleading with Kathy Bates to untie him from the bed like James Caan in Misery. Though it may be an editor’s trick, Diego Maradona convincingly frames his surrender to drugs and drinking culture, fuelled by the Camorra crime syndicate, as a consequence, in part, of the madness surrounding him.
But the film also captures some of the intoxicating highs from that time, which today have taken on mythical status. That Maradona scored two of the most iconic goals of the 20th century ( both against England in the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup) in less than five minutes, is hardly believable. Even less so is Victor Hugo Morales’s now- famous live commentary on the second, in which he asked, “Cosmic kite, what planet did you come from, to leave so many Englishmen in the dust?” before thanking God ( or Maradona?) for football and “these tears.”
Even the pantomime villainy of Maradona beating Italy in the World Cup ‘ 90 semi-final on penalties in Naples feels like something from a Verdi opera. The consequences, both internal and external, were real and devastating: A nation turned against him, and his life began to crumble with paternity disputes, court proceedings and failed drug tests.
Because of how the game has changed in the intervening years, these moments feel like they happened centuries ago. On film, Maradona’s individualistic brilliance looks quaint next to the ridiculous video gamelike ability of fellow Argentine Lionel Messi. Modern grounds have lost the grit of places like the San Paolo Stadium. A player with Maradona’s vices would likely get iced out of the game today. And something like the 1986 World Cup seems utterly impossible now.
The tournament is bloated beyond compare, its potentially iconic moments overrepresented by GIF culture and the endless “snackable content” of the internet, which paradoxically buries itself. I loved the 2014 and 2018 World Cups, but I’d be hard pressed to remember a moment from them the way I remember Maradona’s pass to Buruchaga in the 1986 final.
Yet, Diego Maradona is a good reminder that, for all the nostalgia for yesteryear, we still may not want to go back to that time. Despite the shoddy transfer system, the Bosman ruling has given players far greater say in making their own career choices. There is more football on television than ever before, and the money that comes from it has helped modernize grounds, making them far safer. And though football is still wildly corrupt, corruption is at least less brazen. The rules are better at protecting players from abuse on the pitch, though concussion protocols still have a very long way to go. Football might not be much better today, but returning to the past isn’t an attractive option, either — let alone a realistic one.
This, even more than the utterly tragic story of El Diego himself, may be the ultimate value of Diego Maradona. The film, with its shaky shots of sweaty fans leaning over the concrete curves of the San Paolo Stadium as a then-svelte Maradona strolls by, all to see a glimpse of a god in the flesh, reminds us that yes, football really used to be like this — incompetent, corrupt, violent even, unwatched in North America, but also glorious to the point of absurdity.
But the documentary’s final lesson is you can never go home again. Though the game may be less wonderful today, it is also a lot less sick.