You can’t miss him. The roads into Buenos Aires from Ezeiza airport are lined with reminders of football’s importance in Argentina, especially during a World Cup; every mile, there are billboards of anything from the country’s other footballing icon, Lionel Messi, advertising air-conditioning units to the new ‘Mega Dibu’ cheeseburger, a play on the nickname of the national team’s current goalkeeper, Emiliano Martinez.
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And then, just as you approach Avenida 9 de Julio, the 15-lane highway that runs through the heart of the capital, there he is. Diego Armando Maradona, in his prime, towering above the apartment blocks and highways.
Welcome to Argentina.
Measuring 40 metres across and 45 metres high, it is the biggest mural bearing his likeness in the world, and there are plenty of them. It was only unveiled on October 30, on what would have been his 62nd birthday, as this country continues to mourn, and celebrate, the life of one of the most recognisable figures in human history.
Even though his death on November 25, 2020 was over two years ago, it is in some ways as if he never left: adoration and controversy are never far away.
“A lot of people here were against Diego, they say he wasn’t what people think, but they didn’t know him,” lifelong friend Rodolfo Fernandez tells The Athletic. “But when he died, and in the way he died, that’s when people started coming here to buy his shirts.”
Maradona, of course, was Argentina’s inspiration when winning the World Cup in 1986. He almost repeated the feat in 1990, losing in the final, then was sent home after a failed drugs test from the tournament in the United States in 1994. He was their manager at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa when they got to the last eight, and then at Brazil 2014 and Russia 2018, he was there in the stands, the camera panning to him countless times per game.
After Argentina lost to Germany in the 2014 final, he said Messi did not deserve to be named player of the tournament, and in Russia four years ago his animated celebrations and gesticulations became a global story. He did not look well.
He always loomed over the team, and in many ways he still does.
Six weeks ago in Villa Fiorito, the Buenos Aires barrio where Maradona was born and raised, residents threw birthday parties in their most famous son’s honour, singing songs and passing around pictures from his youth.
Among the crowd was Fernando Zarate, Maradona’s cousin, who grew up and still lives in Fiorito.
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“It brings back so many memories — things that we lived with him,” Zarate said. “He always carried Fiorito with him. He never forgot where he came from. A lot of his friends are still here.
“It fills you with emotion, how he is having an impact — on children especially — is very overwhelming.
“I think all social classes connected with him. He was always more on the side of the people, but he touched everyone.”
Fiorito remains an impoverished area, the kind that other Argentinians warn you not to visit, or at least to be very careful if you do. Even the local taxi driver said he would pull his cap down over his eyes and keep himself to himself, before getting out of there as soon as possible.
It is a place where some residents feel the need to go out at night into Buenos Aires itself, on the other side of a contaminated river, to dig through the residents’ rubbish in search of anything they might need.
Maradona’s former house, which is occupied by a new family now, is guarded by a rickety-looking fence upon which fans have hung Argentina flags, now washed-out by the intense sun, and other keepsakes.
Half of the building is covered by a large Maradona mural bearing the words ‘La casa de d10s’ — the house of God — while the other half features another Argentina flag, in better condition, and one showing Maradona playing for Buenos Aires giants Boca Juniors.
As a mark of respect after his death, the building was declared a national historic location, joining the houses where former First Lady of Argentina Evita Peron grew up and a host of churches and monuments.
There is a steady stream of visitors, people looking to pay their respects, although even those from the area who bring relatives from elsewhere park their cars outside, peer through the fence and then take off again.
The house directly across the street is adorned with another mural, and locals will point you in the direction of Club Estrella, a football pitch a few blocks away, which was the site of those birthday celebrations.
Argentine football folklore is full of players who have come through on these testing pitches known as ‘potreros’, with stories of how their unpredictable bounces and tough landings helped hone the touch and balance of some of the biggest names in the sport. But a visit to this dusty expanse is a reminder there are hundreds of thousands of hopefuls who never mastered those bounces and whose balance, quite possibly, got even worse.
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On Sunday, the day after Argentina beat Australia to reach the quarter-finals of the World Cup in Qatar, the local veterans’ league struggled through their latest round of fixtures. It was, in reality, far too hot for football — reflected by the fact there were only four goals scored across at least five hours of action, and two of those came from the same team, who are top of the league by a distance.
Gasoleros, who have been playing there for 25 years, played out a goalless draw in the midday sun before retreating to their allotted corner, in the shade of some trees, to spend the rest of the day drinking soda and Cinzano (a type of vermouth), litre bottles of Brahma beer and a surprisingly tasty mix of beer and Coca-Cola, drunk from the bottom half of a two-litre plastic bottle that had been cut in half with a knife. A dozen chickens sizzled on a barbecue nearby.
“There are players like (Juan Roman) Riquelme, who everybody respects because of his quality,” says Sergi, the captain. “He played for Boca but he’s respected by everybody. Enzo Francescoli, the Uruguayan, he played for River (Plate, Boca’s big local rivals) but everybody respects him, because of the quality. But Maradona unites everybody. He’s the only one. Whether you’re in the ‘B’, ‘C’ or regional divisions, he unites everybody. Only Maradona can do that.”
Some of the older members of the Gasoleros team remember Maradona juggling an orange at the age of five. One recalls an incident when he was 18 and reels off the story as if it were nothing: Maradona, just 13 at the time but playing among adults, scored in a 4-2 win, which allowed him and his team-mates to divide up and take home the 1,000 pesos that had been wagered on the outcome by players and those who had gathered to watch.
Football stories are 10 a penny in this barrio. One of the team’s managers, nicknamed El Profe, played in the Argentine Primera Division in the 1990s. Then there’s the tale of ‘Goyo’, who lived not 10 metres from Gasoleros’ corner, and was, apparently, better than Maradona, but suffered a terrible knee injury.
They insist, too, that Maradona never actually played on this pitch, that it is just something said to generate mystique. The real pitch he used was indeed three blocks away, but it is all houses now.
“Es el mas grande,” says Roque, part of the Gasoleros crew. Then follows a fairly heated rant about how Messi “doesn’t exist” in Argentina, that he’s “a great friend of Spain”, that Messi has not achieved what Maradona has. “Messi won a Copa America. So what? He lost three finals (two at the Copa America and one at the World Cup).” When it’s pointed out that Argentina is surely lucky to have two of the greatest players of all time, the reply comes back, “No! Only one.”
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This was a much more common view in Argentina in the past, even as recently as five years ago. There had been some degree of mistrust around Messi, largely because he went directly to Barcelona at age 13 and never played for a club in Argentina. Many Argentinians never felt like he was one of their own in the way Carlos Tevez did, for example, let alone Maradona.
But that is starting to change.
The timing of this World Cup, shifted to the Qatari winter, means the build-up in Argentina coincided with both Maradona’s birthday and the anniversary of his death.
And in Argentina, the build-up to a World Cup is something else.
“Leo (Messi) is making us dream and we’ve had five months of news reports about Qatar,” Sergio Aguero, former national-team striker, explained before the tournament. His interviewer, by contrast, noted that the build-up in Spain had begun on that particular Monday in November.
It’s a potent mix; the expectations of a World Cup and the emotions that still surround Maradona’s life and death, and any Argentina player who faced the media was asked about him.
“It’s an enormous sadness that he left us so quickly,” defender Lisandro Martinez said. “No doubt he should be here with us — in his seat somewhere, cheering us on, being with us, supporting us.”
There is barely a flag at an Argentina game in Qatar — and there are thousands of them — that does not bear his, Messi’s face or both of them.
In the weeks leading up to the November 20 kick-off, Argentine media had become obsessed with ‘coincidencias maradoneanas’ — links to 1986, no matter how tenuous, taken as signs that Argentina will take home the trophy for the first time since Maradona hoisted it above his head in Mexico City 36 years ago.
Among those coincidences is a card game played by the squad before last summer’s Copa America, when it was said that if they guessed every card correctly from one to 10, they would win the tournament. They did both things.
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As part of their predictions, Messi had correctly identified the ‘cinco de copas’ (like the five of diamonds). Within days of this story coming to light, a photo emerged of Maradona on a journey with the national team, sitting at a table with the cinco de copas in front of him.
A few days later, a video surfaced of an old television appearance where Maradona had been a surprise guest. Behind him as he sat and talked was a poster that included the date ‘December 18’ — the day of this year’s final.
This has continued as the tournament has gone on, with developments such as Morocco’s qualification for the last 16 — the first time they have done so since 1986 — all adding to the sense that something supernatural is happening.
And yet, it does seem that the more football is played, the more Messi takes centre stage.
Before that Copa America final against Brazil last summer, played behind closed doors in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana stadium, there was an incredibly moving tribute to Maradona projected into the night sky. He loomed over that event, too, but Messi became the story: at the final whistle the players, without exception, ran to him after he had sunk to the turf in a haze of emotions at having finally won something for his country.
This World Cup is heading in a similar direction. Talk of Maradona, in relation to the national team’s fortunes, has subsided. He is no longer there in the stands, there is no opportunity for the cameras to pan to him, for him to give his opinion, for speculation about his health. The focus is on the players and, above all, on Messi.
Should they fail to win it a week on Sunday, though, that will inevitably change.
You cannot walk for more than five minutes around La Paternal, a 30-minute drive from downtown Buenos Aires, without seeing a mural of Maradona.
This is the barrio he moved to with his parents after he made it as a professional at Argentinos Juniors, another team in this sprawling city, whose greater metropolitan area is home to 15 million people.
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The club’s stadium, renamed after him in 2004, has been plastered in murals ever since, but following his death some of the walls were whitewashed so new ones could go up. Every stage of his life and career is accounted for now — there’s even a mural of him and his parents, as well as a more recent depiction where he looked old, round but certainly healthy.
Inside the ground, there is a Maradona-centric museum and a ‘sanctuary’ that opened after his death, serving almost as a place of worship for anybody who wants to sit in the pews and be alone with their thoughts. Shirts, flags and even a Cuban cigar have been brought from all over the world. Tears are common.
(Photo: La Casa de Dios)
There are countless other murals, unofficial ones, scattered around La Paternal. There’s even an old truck that was brought the 11 miles (17km) north from Fiorito and somehow hoisted up onto a roof, and the home in which he lived with his parents from 1978 until 1980 has been reclaimed by the local authorities and also given national historic status.
It is now a museum that welcomes on average 150 visitors from all over the world every week, and over the past 20 years a team of people has worked to turn it into a genuine time capsule. There are old football boots next to the bed, a keyboard in the games area, and the fridge is filled with the packaging of old products that bore his name, such as the carton for ‘El Diego’ white wine.
There is a roof terrace with the classic Argentine ‘asado’ barbecue set up and two murals, overlooking the front of the house where there is a Fiat 125 Berlina and a Ford Coupe Taunus, which were two of Maradona’s first cars. Everything is a replica, painstakingly crafted to look as close to the original as possible. Fortunately for the museum, those replicas mean they are safe from the global search for Maradona’s genuine belongings as lawyers try to piece together his estate.
La Paternal, then, is very much Maradona country — but some of the obvious adoration may be superficial.
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Rodolfo Fernandez, the lifelong friend mentioned earlier, is 85 years old, has been an Argentinos Juniors socio for 75 of them, and works in a shop selling club merchandise over the road from that truck on the roof. He was there for Maradona’s first trial (and he also remembers ‘Goyo’ Carrizo, the lad from Fiorito — he had trialled with Argentinos, been selected, but told the coach that his friend, Diego, was much better than he was. The knee injury struck later.)
“In a certain way, a lot of people around here were ungrateful towards him,” Rodolfo says. “For example, I always defended him because I saw that he was an extraordinary kid, as a player and as a person. We always sold more Diego shirts to foreigners than people from here.”
He can be difficult to follow, Rodolfo, as a million memories and feelings swirl around in his head. He was, after all, born in 1937, the year after Buenos Aires’ iconic Obelisco monument was built. He drifts off to an eye-catching, rather controversial topic, but soon comes back.
“People who came here from overseas valued him more than people here, and this only started to change when Diego died. That’s how people are now. It’s like with the national team; people applaud them when they win, but when they lose… Argentina is like that.
“But in here (his shop) nobody talks badly about Diego, because if they did, I’ll chuck them out, straight out.”
It stands to reason, this idea that people in the area that became his home may not be quite as pro-Maradona as it appears. It is no secret that he was, to be extremely polite, no saint.
Wherever he went, from Mexico to the Middle East, controversy followed.
Last year, around the first anniversary of his death, a woman named Mavys Alvarez alleged that Maradona, 40 at the time, raped her at a drug rehabilitation centre in the Cuban city of Havana when she was 16 years old. Alvarez told a Buenos Aires court investigating her allegations of trafficking against Maradona’s former entourage that he had been violently and sexually abusive towards her over the course of five years.
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“He covers my mouth, he rapes me; I don’t want to think about it too much,” Alvarez said. “I stopped being a girl, all my innocence was stolen from me. It’s hard. You stop living the innocent things that a girl of that age has to experience.”
The allegation against Maradona has not been proven and the trafficking case was dismissed.
It was far from the first time he had been accused of violence towards women; in 2014, a video emerged appearing to show him twice hitting his partner at the time, which he denied doing.
Rodolfo, during his reflections, had referred to “a mountain of things that are coming out that I know are not true” and Fernando Signorini, Maradona’s fitness coach between 1983 and 1994 — and part of his Argentina backroom staff at the 2010 World Cup — is adamant he never saw any abuse.
“No, never, never — at least in the time I was with him,” Signorini tells The Athletic. “In fact, it was the opposite. There are various stories that people have invented about him, and I’ve no doubt they’re all false. When a person can no longer defend themselves is when people can come out and say whatever they want.”
Signorini features heavily in Oscar-winning film-maker Asif Kapadia’s 2019 documentary, titled Diego Maradona; he is the one who remarked that there were two sides to the great footballer: ‘Diego’, the innocent boy, and ‘Maradona’, the character he invented to cope with the pressure on his shoulders.
“His (first) partner was Claudia, their relationship was divine; they were very young — 21 or 22 years old — and they already had the eyes of the world on them,” Signorini says.
“They weren’t ready. Everybody forgets where Diego came from, Villa Fiorito. There weren’t any presidents who came to him or his family to offer any solutions, no Popes invited him to the Vatican. The way these kids were used as puppets was brutal, and that’s why I’m very angry with people in football — above all the leadership — and with a large percentage of sports journalism for how they used him.”
That controversial topic that Rodolfo casually brought up relates to Maradona’s death.
“We always sold more Diego shirts to foreigners than people from here,” he was saying. “I’m not a doctor, but they killed Diego,” he added, in the same breath. “Diego didn’t die, they killed him, but I can’t say because I don’t know. I was in contact with him until a year before he died, more or less.”
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In June of this year, it was announced that eight medical professionals will stand trial for medical negligence relating to Maradona’s death. A panel of 20 medical experts had previously determined that his treatment was beset by “deficiencies and irregularities” and that he would have “had a better chance of survival” in a medical facility, rather than the house in the San Andres district of Buenos Aires where he was taken after having surgery on a blood clot in his brain two weeks before he eventually passed away. All eight medical professionals deny any wrongdoing.
In March of this year, “the heirs of Maradona” — Claudia Villafane, his girlfriend and then wife of almost 20 years, and Veronica Ojeda, another former partner, as well as Dalma, Giannina, Diego Jnr and Dieguito Fernando, four of the five children he recognised as his — signed a letter calling for the “objective truth” related to his death.
“Our intention is to find out what happened in the final part of our father’s life,” the statement reads. “Also, to know the truth of the actions of his entourage, who surrounded him and isolated him in the last years of his life, probably leaving him to his own fate, emptying his estate and becoming millionaires overnight.”
The family also produced a legal document that named a group of people — including his former lawyer Matias Morla, who is reported to control some of his wealth — who “reduced Diego Armando Maradona to a condition of servitude, restricting his contact with family and friends, both in person and by telephone, supplying him with alcohol, drugs and marijuana and manipulating him psychologically, with the purpose of keeping him under their power to benefit economically from the income he generated”. Morla has denied this claim.
Maradona has five legally-recognised children, but only four signed the statement. Another six people came forward after his death to claim he was their father, but DNA tests, completed in June, concluded that the final two of those claimants had no biological link.
In August, during a live television appearance by Ojeda, Villafane called in to take issue with a claim that two of Maradona’s children had separate contracts that others had not seen.
It is, seemingly, a never-ending drama.
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And the list of cars, watches, properties, jewellery and all kinds of other treasures that form that estate is truly remarkable — at times faintly ridiculous.
After a year’s worth of searches lawyers uncovered $6million (£4.95m) worth of belongings from Cuba to Belarus in eastern Europe, Dubai to Venezuela. Estimates suggest the total value could be worth anywhere from $40m to $500m, while other estimates suggest that once debts are accounted for, it could be less than $1m.
Highlights include three BMWs, one of which was fitted out with lights and sirens like a police car, which he drove to training during his time as manager of Argentine club Gimnasia La Plata from 2019 until his death (estimated value: $193,000).
There is a Rolls-Royce in Dubai worth €300,000 (£260,000, $314,000), which would cost just as much to ship back to Argentina. In Belarus, from his time as honorary president of Dynamo Brest, an Overcomer Hunta that’s part 4×4 and part tank, a diamond ring ($300,000) and a Harley-Davidson ($30,000). He also owns 0.5 per cent of the club.
According to Argentine newspaper Clarin, he owned around 4,000 slot machines in a Buenos Aires casino, and another 100,000 in Europe.
There are oil companies and cereal and flour factories in Venezuela, clothing lines in the United States and UK, a ‘Diego’ copyright in Italy.
There are shares in a hotel in Cuba, next to a building given to him by Fidel Castro, the country’s former president.
Before his death, he sold the rights to make a drama series based on his life to Amazon for $1m, and was due another $4m for a show broadcast during the 2018 World Cup.
Last year, a huge container arrived from Dubai loaded with around 200 items, some of which were auctioned off to pay off debts (it is reported he had five bank accounts around the world, and that two of them in Argentina amounted to 900,000 pesos, roughly $50,000).
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The container’s inventory included everything from a signed card from Castro to some of Aguero’s old Manchester City shirts. Televisions, treadmills, stairmasters, jackets, pyjamas, suits, shoes and other football shirts made up the rest of it, and anything that wasn’t of sentimental value to the family was sold at auction.
Many football shirts he wore in his playing career were not sold either.
He had given away his jersey from the 1986 World Cup quarter-final victory over England, in which he scored both the ‘Hand of God’ and ‘The Goal of the Century’, to Steve Hodge, who was in the English team that day.
In May this year, Hodge sold it for £7.1million — the highest price ever paid at auction for a piece of sports memorabilia.
Turning on to the Avenida 9 de Julio, not long after passing that huge Maradona mural, is another stark reminder of life in Argentina. It’s another protest.
“It could be anything,” says our taxi driver. “There’s something new every day.”
On this occasion, thousands of people from various organisations descended on the 221-foot (67m) Obelisco to demand improvements to the country’s social programmes and benefits payouts.
Argentina’s annual inflation is expected to hit 100 per cent by the end of the year, with locals complaining that 1,000 pesos, the largest bill in circulation, is barely enough to get you a large bottle of Coca-Cola. You can’t walk far without being offered questionable exchange rates on US dollars and Brazilian reals.
Based on the evidence here and in Qatar, the World Cup has proven a very effective distraction for struggling citizens: the number of people celebrating at the Obelisco after the last-16 win over Australia on Saturday far outnumbered even the sizeable protest 24 hours earlier.
“The World Cup is a distraction, but after the games have finished, life goes on,” says Alfredo Alonso, a football scout who took now-Argentina and Manchester City striker Julian Alvarez to River Plate at the age of 15.
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That distraction can only happen because football is such a cornerstone in this part of the world: if the murals in Villa Fiorito and La Paternal are more striking reminders of its largest sporting icon, you will find more on shopping bags, phone cases and the incalculable amount of No 10 shirts worn by fans of all ages.
There is also a rather curious billboard of Maradona overlooking the Obelisco; wearing traditional Arab headdress, a Boca Juniors shirt and draped in an Argentina flag, a mid-40s-looking Maradona smiles out, competing for space with one of Burger King’s latest offers.
“He will always be remembered because he’s become part of global football folklore, a legend, but in its own way it’s exaggerated by the interests of the media,” Signorini reflects. “I don’t pay too much attention to this, but it forms how people feel. I’ve always said that when they had to act, to help him, they didn’t. Now it’s easy.”
Maradona’s image continues to make money, then, and there is certainly truth to the idea that his legend has been propagated to benefit certain companies or individuals, no matter how much he is genuinely revered by millions.
“It’s different for everybody, but for a part of society he still means a lot — above all in the most humble areas where people don’t have a lot, because of course he was one of them, he was from that social class. But the rest, no,” Signorini says. “I repeat, there’s a large percentage of society that acts with great hypocrisy. Now they can’t complain or criticise because they know it’s not politically correct to criticise him.”
Signorini counts Maradona as “the most important person in my life”, but last spoke to him in 2015 and did not attend the funeral. Even that event was mired in controversy after photos leaked online showing morgue workers posing with Maradona’s body.
“It was like a Roman Circus, I didn’t want to add to the herd,” Signorini says. “I didn’t cry about my beloved friend. It’s the opposite, in fact. I remember things with great joy because, thanks to him, I got to live a fantastic life. I’m not going to give the satisfaction to the death.”
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It’s clear these memories of Maradona — as complicated as they may be for some — will live on, quite possibly forever.
Maradona may have died but, as during every World Cup for decades, in Argentina he is very much still here.
Read more: Argentina eliminated the Netherlands on penalties to advance to the semi-finals
(Main graphic – photos: Getty Images/design: Eamonn Dalton)
