Diego Maradona: Football’s Brilliant Tortured Bad Boy


MARADONA
Boy. Vaccine. God.
by Guillem Balague

“Gods don’t retire,” Eduardo Galeano once said of Diego Maradona, “no matter how human they are.” Desperate Maradona thought of doing just that. Traveling on a world tour with Argentine club Boca Juniors and collapsing under the pressure of becoming a sudden star, he was only 20 years old when he first thought of quitting football. “I can’t sleep. I can’t handle the fame, I can’t relax anywhere,” he told one of his teammates. “I want people to forget about Maradona,” he said to another.

Spanish football journalist Guillem Balagué suggests in his new biography “Maradona” that the warning signs are always there. Drawing on a variety of books, documentaries and archival clips from the Spanish media, Balagué covers a well-known area: Maradona’s austere childhood in the Villa Fiorito slums of Buenos Aires; the infamous exit from Barcelona; two outrageous goals against England in the 1986 World Cup; the spiral that turned into an addiction later that year; the failed drug test in 1991; 15-month ban; and the slow, stuttering road to retirement. None of this is particularly new, of course. What sets Balagué’s biography apart from previous essays is that his access to members of Maradona’s inner circle, particularly his longtime personal trainer, gives fresh texture and context to Maradona’s victories and crises.

It becomes clear early in Balagué’s narrative that Maradona’s story is also a parable for the brutal nature of commercial sports. Every club that Maradona signed for struggled to give him money. Club managers took risky loans to get their money’s worth, often filling their schedules with show games, forcing their teams to play through fatigue and injuries. (Maradona’s body, of which Balagué repeatedly mentions, was regularly “exploited” with painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, and steroid injections.) Players earned only a small fraction of their income, and while Maradona often took the biggest cut, they also had a it was troublesome. for major teams to agitate for higher collective wages, to oppose playing conditions and, at one point, to call for the creation of an athletes’ union to challenge FIFA’s firm grip on world football.

This inevitably led to frictions, as the intrigue around Maradona’s private life and his unpredictable, sarcastic comments to the press. When the results on the field were not shaken, the tension rose rapidly. After a brawl during a cup match, Barcelona dismissed him immediately. At Napoli, Balagué suggests, the club president encouraged, perhaps even leaked, negative stories. Fed up with Maradona’s antics at the time, Sevilla hired detectives, taking precautionary measures to compile the files for the reported blackmail they used to terminate her contract.

The result was a complex of persecution that would last until his death in 2020. Maradona himself oscillated between an infectious, angry confidence that fueled his abuses, and a deep, overwhelming anxiety that would eventually consume his career. As Maradona later admitted, at his most vulnerable moment, he would lock himself in his bathroom for hours, days and nights filled with “crying, anguish, and anxiety.” Once, hearing her daughter’s voice outside the door, she flushed the toilet. When she wasn’t locked in the bathroom, she lay paralyzed in bed, took excessive anti-anxiety medication, skipping practice, business obligations, and other responsibilities.

These moments when Balagué is at his best are conveyed in highly readable, if sometimes clumsy, prose. But this biography falls short in many ways. Any discussion of Argentine politics is tense, bitter and often seen as a means to highlight Maradona’s sometimes unifying and sometimes polarizing influence. His long, disappointing, though disappointing, coaching career gets only fleeting mention, as is the ongoing struggle with addiction that has slowly led to his death.

The result is an incomplete portrait. Perhaps a small consolation is that this biography is not the first – a recently updated book by Jimmy Burns from 1996 that covers much of the same backdrop – and it almost certainly won’t be the last. Since his death at the age of 60, Maradona has continued to make headlines, most recently with allegations of manslaughter by his doctors and nurses, and several controversial paternity cases. As Balagué writes, narratives of football heroes and villains, often identified within seconds, are “built on the swamp.” Maradona’s legacy is well-founded, but there is a feeling that this has only now been fully resolved.



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