Jorge Cyterszpiler
Football agent who expertly manipulated the media to make a fortune for his star client, Maradona
JORGE CYTERSZPILER, who has died aged 58, masterminded Diego Maradona’s rise to fame as his first agent and manager long before the footballer was hailed as the greatest player of his generation; but in 1985 he was abruptly sacked by his erstwhile friend as the footballer’s professional and personal life, as well as his finances, veered off the rails.
Jorge Horacio Cyterszpiler was born on August 9 1958 and grew up near the stadium of the Argentinos Junior club, in the La Paternal district of Buenos Aires. After he contracted polio as a boy, which left him with a limp, the team adopted Jorge as a mascot.
His elder brother Juan Eduardo played for the side but died of a haemorrhage after taking a kick to the groin. Jorge, who was 12, became depressed for several months and took to his bed. But he was drawn back to the stadium by tales of the brilliance of a boy who had joined the club’s youth side, Los Cebollitas – “The Little Onions.”
Diego Maradona was two years younger than Jorge. Short, stocky, shy and hailing from a shanty-town in the city, he seemed to have everything against him. Yet already his skill was such that great things beckoned. At half-time in senior matches he would be brought on to entertain the crowd with tricks.
Jorge was thrilled by Diego’s talent but recognised as well that the curly-headed boy needed looking after. Befriended by the Cyterszpilers – Jewish refugees from Poland who had done well for themselves in Argentina – Maradona saw for the first time in their home what his future could be like; he had grown up in a shack that lacked even running water.
The two boys enjoyed going to the cinema, playing Monopoly and watching boxing, with Jorge treating Diego to his first taste of pizza. Unlike Maradona, who frequently skipped school, however, Cyterszpiler was studious. He won a place to read Economics at Buenos Aires University and in his spare time worked in the offices of the Argentinos club.
Maradona made his debut for the side at 15 and the following year asked Cyterszpiler to manage his affairs.
Argentina then had no recognised football agents and Cyterszpiler had no qualifications, beyond having read avidly about Mark Mccormack, who had pioneered representation for sports stars. Yet Maradona and his family, notably his formidable mother Tota, were only too aware that sharks were circling “El Pibe de Oro” – “The Golden Rascal” – and preferred to entrust him to someone they knew.
The tubby Cyterszpiler proved lacking neither in chutzpah nor ambition. Of course, the interest in Maradona that soon mounted among the world’s great clubs stemmed from the player’s remarkable skill.
Yet Cyterszpiler expertly manipulated the media to maximise business opportunities for him. A proposed (if somewhat improbable) move to Sheffield United fell through in the late Seventies, but by the time Maradona was 21, Cyterszpiler had secured him an annual income of $2 million and he had bought a string of properties.
Much of this fortune came from a multitude of sponsorship deals cleverly negotiated by Cyterszpiler. When trying to tie up a deal with Coca-cola, for instance, he increased his client’s marketability by leaking to the press a story that Barcelona had paid a world record fee for Maradona. At the time it was not true, but after stringing the Catalan club along for three years in order to force up the price, he eventually did secure the transfer, for £5 million, in 1982.
As chronicled in Jimmy Burns’s biography of the player, it was in Barcelona that Maradona – still aged only 21 – began to court disaster. He found the club officials stuffy while they in turn objected to his way of life, which centred not so much on football as on the easy availability of food, women and, eventually, cocaine, a habit which would last 20 years.
When Barcelona hired Maradona’s former national manager, César Menotti, he moved training to the afternoons to accommodate the star’s penchant for late nights, jaunts in which he was often accompanied by a crowd of hangers-on. Among his whims was a crush on Princess Caroline of Monaco, which led to Cyterszpiler vainly trying to organise a match in Monte Carlo.
All this fun had to be paid for, of course. In the late Seventies, Cyterszpiler had set up, for tax purposes, an offshore company in Lichtenstein. Most of the player’s money was funnelled through Maradona Productions. This now moved its base to Barcelona, but Cyterszpiler found it increasingly hard to maintain the line between being Maradona’s business manager and his friend.
By 1984, the company was heavily in debt, a consequence of the player’s unrestrained spending and Cyterszpiler’s bad investments. These included a bingo hall in Paraguay and a film about Maradona’s life that cost his manager $1 million to make but which failed to secure any sales; the footage was put into store for safekeeping, and then lost.
The only solution was to deepen the growing rift with Barcelona so as to engineer a lucrative transfer to another club. In 1984, following Maradona’s participation in a mass brawl in the Spanish cup final in the presence of King Juan Carlos, Cyterszpiler secured another world record fee, of £6.9 million, from Napoli.
Maradona would feel much more at home in Naples and played perhaps the best football of his career in helping the club to become the first from the south of Italy to win the league. In the process, he made himself a folk hero to the city. After speaking to Cyterszpiler, Gianni Agnelli, who owned Fiat and Juventus, the twin symbols of northern Italian economic and sporting dominance, was happy to present Maradona with a rare Ferrari Testarossa on the basis that it was good for business.
Cyterszpiler was not to have everything his own way for long. He was told by the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, not to try to enforce copyright on Maradona merchandise sold in the region. This cut into the player’s income just as his spending soared again, as did the number of those sponging off him. Matters came to a head in 1985, following Maradona’s split from Claudia Villafane, the long-term girlfriend whom he had recently married. While he was in Mexico, Cyterszpiler was notified that he had been fired.
To his credit, he never bad-mouthed Maradona, and in 1989 bounced back as the campaign manager for Carlos Menem’s successful run for the Argentine presidency. He then organised football tournaments in Argentina before, in 1995, becoming once more an agent. His clients included Martin Demichelis, the former Manchester City player.
Latterly, however, he had been ill, had separated from his wife and was said to be suffering from depression.
He apparently took his own life by jumping from the seventh floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, while his therapist was out of the room.
Jorge Cyterszpiler, born August 9 1958, died May 7 2017