On Wednesday November 25, 2020 Diego Armando Maradona died of cardiac arrest at the age of sixty. Maradona belongs to the small number of personalities who enjoy a planetary reputation and therefore do not need any introduction.
The news of his death has been greeted with dismay all over the world, and in the suburbs of every city in the world there is at least one child crying Dieguito, el Pibe de Oro. Commemorations and symbolic actions have taken place everywhere to remember Maradona, the man who became a legend. In Argentina, Italy and even in civil war-torn Syria, murals dedicated to Diego have appeared.
In Naples, the news of his death was greeted with dismay, people cried in the streets, each of us, fan or not, felt that he had lost a part of ourselves, an uncle or a dear friend. Despite the lockdown there were small gatherings in the popular areas of the city: in the Spanish quarters and in front of the San Paolo stadium in the Fuorigrotta district that will soon bear the name of Diego Armando Maradona.
Realizing a dream
Diego Armando Maradona was born in a poor neighborhood of Lanus within the large metropolitan area of Bueno Aires, son of a porter he lived in a house of a few square meters with eight other people. Like many young people of his generation, the young Diego had only one dream, or rather two, to play a World Cup with Argentina and win it. Life gave him the chance to realize both these dreams, he was the exception that proves the general rule that most young people living in such areas have no way out of their situation except to dream.
After having played in Boca Juniores, Maradona continued his career in the Spanish state. He arrived in Naples in July 1984 after playing for the prestigious Barcelona. Before he even arrived in the city he was already a legend. That extraordinary player had in fact chosen to play for a team in the South of Italy, turning his back on the rich northern teams: Juventus owned by the Agnelli, the owners of Fiat, and Berlusconi’s AC Milan.
When he arrived in Naples he was welcomed as a deity at the San Paolo stadium by 80,000 people and by the entire people of Naples. There is no Neapolitan family that does not remember what it was doing when Diego arrived in the city. His arrival was just a few years after the terrible devastation of the Irpinia earthquake in November 1980, the dramatic consequences of the earthquake, corruption, poverty and the feeling of abandonment of an entire region continue until today.
For this reason, after his arrival in Naples he became the symbolic icon that represented the redemption of a city, of a generation, of a poor but proud people. A people able to challenge and mock the great ones, starting from the rich teams of the North and Europe. In Naples Diego embodied the ransom of the people for generations who had had nothing and who identified with this eccentric and swaggering figure. Diego immediately became the idol of the poor boys of Naples, because as he said: “they are as I was in Buenos Aires”.
The “Hand of God”
In his football career Maradona won everything: he was world champion in 1986, European champion and twice Italian champion with his Napoli in 1986–87 and then 1989–90.
In terms of football, Maradona had no equal. His sporting history is intertwined with the political history of those years. Unforgettable, that goal scored with his hand against England during the final of the World Cup in 1986. That match took on a very high political significance in view of the recent war that had counterposed the Argentinean military junta to Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government in the UK. Diego’s gesture, which many English football fans still do not forgive him for, was a mockery of Thatcher’s government. A gesture which seemed to say: “we too can play dirty!”.
But in that same match in which “the hand of God” scored that controversial and disputed goal, Maradona gave the world another extraordinary and now legendary goal when he started from midfield and dribbled past half the opposing team. He redeemed himself in this way and entered football mythology forever.
In 1990 the World Cup was in Italy. Maradona was the protagonist of the World Cup and took to the field at the San Paolo stadium against Italy, with Argentina knocking them out in the semifinals winning on penalties. In that semi-final all of Naples was supporting Diego, most of the Neapolitans felt more Argentinean than Italian, and were happy to be eliminated by the team of the best player in the world that had given so many joys to the city.
In 1995 he was awarded FIFA’s Golden Ball for his career. Before that time, this award was intended only for European players.
An outsider
Maradona has been much more than an exceptional footballer, a great professional, a sportsman of the highest level, but the legend that represents for Argentina, for Naples and for hundreds of thousands of young proletarians and soccer fans all over the world, redemption, dignity, courage, and the ability to stand up against an unjust system and defeat it without bowing to it.
Although he became very rich, Maradona never stopped speaking the language of the people of whom he was their son. He never accepted to sit at the table of the rich and powerful because he knew that that table was not made for people like him who were despised, a scorn and disdain that Maradona sincerely reciprocated, because after all, even though he was rich and famous, he was always considered a parvenu.
Maradona always tried to avoid those dynamics and mechanisms of a commercial soccer that he abhorred. Unlike other greats of soccer El Pibe always rejected the institutionalization of his figure by soccer organizations. He spoke out clearly against the corruption and overpowering power that dominated, and still dominates FIFA and Conmebol, and for this reason he was ostracized, sidelined, mocked and humiliated despite being the absolute number one, as happened with his disqualification from the 1994 World Cup.
Many of Maradona’s personal demons were well documented. The fact he remained outside the establishment made him “fair game” according to the tabloid media in particular who loved to depict his abuse of drugs and alcohol to ridicule him. The working class masses who loved and supported him only further rooted for him as a result.
However, Maradona’s evident machismo and reports of him engaging in intimate partner violence are troubling, and reveal another side to the footballing legend — one that was sadly a stark contradiction to the Maradona that gained working class hero status for his powerful championing of the poor and oppressed.
Paula Dapena, who plays for the Spanish club Viajes Interrias, sat on the pitch during a minute’s silence to honour Maradona. “We were giving a minute’s silence to someone who committed domestic violence,” she said. “For me, that’s something that my feminist ideals can’t allow…For me he was an incredible player, but as a person he left a lot to be desired.” Paula Dapena’s act of defiance is entirely fitting given the widespread nature of gender violence, and the reality that globally working class and young women are at the forefront of mass struggle for feminist and working class demands, and a life free from violence for all as central to this. As Dapena’s words intimate, the transcendent beauty that Maradona brought to working class lives the world over is immortal, but part of building a struggle and a movement to end the oppression, poverty and elitism Maradona stood against, must mean telling the truth about the insidious nature of gender violence so we can truly unite for change.
Left-winger
In his life Diego has always rejected the closeness to the lobby world that dominates modern soccer. Son of the people, Diego Armando Maradona always refused the courtship of the Argentine political class, he refused candidatures and honorary positions. It is known that he said to the face of the former president of Argentina Mauricio Macri: “You have ruined two generations!” showing instead a sincere attachment to the conditions of the Argentinean popular masses and of the entire continent.
El pibe, a symbol of the struggle for justice for the poor, supported in a confused way many left-wing figures. He became politically attached to the figure of the Argentinean and Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara. He sought and built friendship with Fidel Castro, whom he called a “second father”. In the same way he sided with the progressive and left-wing governments of the continent such as the governments of Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro. More generally, he showed solidarity with all these leaders of South American countries, victims of the aggressiveness of U.S. imperialism.
He openly sided against the bloqueo in Cuba and on the side of the Palestinian masses, he took a stand against the debt to the Third World and used his worldwide recognition to attack the warmongering policies of exporting democracy by US and NATO in the barbaric invasions on Iraq and Afghanistan in 2001 in 2003.
Maradona was first of all a son of the people, he had socialist leanings, a man in whose bosom shone strongly the ideals of social justice, of international solidarity, a man who fully felt his belonging to the popular masses. He was and will be the idol of generations of fans, of those who had the good fortune to see him play, of those who grew up listening to his stories and of the many kids who will meet his gaze of the many murals that adorn the city of Naples and the “barrios” all over the world. Maradona represented the figure of the charismatic bad boy of football, the “chico malo”.. He was a ”dirty God” as the writer Edoardo Galeano defined him.
For these reasons Diego will always live in the heart of the popular masses around the world and in the neighborhoods and suburbs forgotten by everyone as an irreverent and desecrating icon, as a popular anti-hero who teaches to mock the powerful and to love the people who like him are proud, brave and irreverent.
