How Italy’s underdog Naples molded Maradona forever
NAPLES, Italy — Few places are mourning the death of Diego Maradona as much as Naples, the downtrodden, gritty Italian city that clasped the troubled Argentine to its heart at his time of need and was repaid with the best years of perhaps soccer’s greatest ever player.
Buildings around Naples are adorned with depictions of the man who took Napoli to the top of the Italian game and beyond and became an icon and spokesman for Neapolitans, whose chaotic city was feared and loathed in equal measure by the rest of Italy.
“I feel like I represented a part of Italy that didn’t count for anything,” he said in 2019 documentary Diego Maradona.
So deep was ‘barrio boy’ Maradona’s attachment to Naples that he called Napoli’s first-ever league title, won a year after he led Argentina to the 1986 World Cup, the “greatest triumph” of his career.
Surrounded by jubilant fans on the pitch of Napoli’s Stadio San Paolo, he explained why: “I won this one at my home.”
Maradona’s achievements at Napoli, which had been an also-ran until he arrived in 1984, followed a difficult two-year spell at Barcelona.
Another league title followed in 1990 — at the expense of Arrigo Sacchi’s legendary AC Milan side, which featured the likes of Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit. The 1989 UEFA
Cup and an Italian Cup also arrived during Maradona’s seven-year stint in southern Italy, during which he scored 115 goals in all competitions.
He fled in disgrace in 1991, a failed drugs test, an unrecognized son and a billion-lira tax dispute all left back in Naples, where his penchant for cocaine and women were almost as famous as his performances on the pitch.
Maradona became a quasi-religious figure in Naples. He brought joy to a desperately poor city blighted by bloody conflicts between the competing clans of the Camorra organized crime network, some of whom Maradona would get to know very well.
Indeed the 1984 signing of Maradona by Napoli sparked rumors that a chunk of the then world-record $10.48-million fee came from the Camorra’s deep pockets.
“I never asked for anything from the Camorra, they gave me the security of knowing that nothing was going to happen to my two children,” Maradona insisted in a 2017 interview on Italian TV.
However, his access to drugs and women came thanks to the infamous Giuliano clan, who befriended Maradona and furnished his burgeoning cocaine habit.
Maradona himself admitted that every week he would binge from Sunday night until Wednesday, beginning an intense detox routine each Thursday that would get him ready for the next weekend’s match.
When Napoli won the Serie A title in 1987, it caused such wild celebrations that stories of a summer-long party became as famous as the triumph itself.
Another title arrived three years later before it all began to fall apart, not long after he and the Argentine national team enraged Italy by beating the Azzurri in a 1990 World Cup semifinal — in Naples of all places.
As a result he became a hate figure in Italy and his support network slowly melted away. In February 1991. police announced he had been caught on wiretaps asking for cocaine and prostitutes from a mafia figure. A trumped-up drugs trafficking charge soon followed.
The failed drugs test that finished him off came after a match with Bari two months later, and an unprecedented worldwide ban from the game until June 1992 left him scuttling back to Buenos Aires, never to reach the same heights again.