Diego Maradona

He was fifteen, ten days short of his sixteenth birthday, when he came on for Argentinos Juniors against Talleres de Córdoba. He nutmegged the first man he met.

Twenty-one years later he stopped, on his thirty-seventh birthday. In between he won a World Cup almost single-handedly, dragged a provincial Italian club past Milan and Juventus to two league titles it had waited sixty years for, broke the world transfer record twice, and was banned from football twice — once for cocaine, once for ephedrine.

There is no quiet version of this career.

Diego Armando Maradona was born on 30 October 1960 in Lanús, Buenos Aires, and grew up in Villa Fiorito on the southern edge of the city. His father worked in a chemicals factory. His mother was of Italian and Croatian descent. He had four older sisters and two younger brothers, Hugo and Raúl, both of whom became professional footballers.

He was given a football at three years old. At eight, playing for a neighbourhood side called Estrella Roja, he was spotted by a scout and taken to Los Cebollitas — the Little Onions — the youth team of Argentinos Juniors. He joined them in March 1969. Between 1973 and 1974 that team went 141 games without losing one.

He made his first-team debut on 20 October 1976, wearing number 16, ten days before his sixteenth birthday.

Five seasons there produced 116 goals in 166 matches. That is 0.699 goals a game — set as a teenager, in a first division, for a club that finished nowhere near the top of it. His Boca season edges it, 28 in 40 at 0.700, by a margin too small to mean anything.

He made his debut for Argentina on 27 February 1977 against Hungary, aged sixteen. In 1979 he won the World Youth Championship in Japan and was given its Golden Ball. Sepp Blatter, who watched that tournament, said Maradona "left everyone open-mouthed every time he got on the ball."

Boca Juniors paid US$4 million for him in February 1981. He made his debut on the 22nd and scored twice in a 4–1 win.

He played forty games and scored twenty-eight. Boca won the 1981 Metropolitano — his first league title, in his only full season at the club he had supported as a boy.

Then came the 1982 World Cup in Spain, and it went badly. Argentina were the holders. He was twenty-one and marked out of three matches, and in the second-round defeat to Brazil, with Argentina three goals down and five minutes left, he kicked out at Batista and was sent off.

Barcelona paid £5 million in 1982 — a world record fee. He stayed two seasons, played thirty-six league matches and scored twenty-two — thirty-eight goals in fifty-eight games once the cups are counted. He was the club's top scorer in 1982–83 with eleven league goals and twenty-three in all competitions.

He won two trophies there. The Copa del Rey final on 4 June 1983 was settled 2–1 against Real Madrid at La Romareda with a goal in the ninetieth minute. The Copa de la Liga that same month was also won against Real Madrid, 4–3 over two legs — 2–2 away, 2–1 at home, on 26 and 29 June.

Almost nobody remembers any of it, because of what happened on 24 September 1983. Andoni Goikoetxea of Athletic Bilbao came through the back of him and fractured his left ankle. Before that he had missed three months of the previous season with hepatitis.

Two injuries, two seasons, one falling-out with a president who could not be worked with. He was sold.

Napoli paid £6.9 million in July 1984, breaking the world transfer record for the second time in two years. He was the first player in history to set the world record fee twice — £5 million to Barcelona in 1982, £6.9 million to Napoli in 1984.

Seventy-five thousand people came to the Stadio San Paolo to watch him be presented. Not to watch a match — there was no match. To watch him stand on the pitch and wave.

To understand what followed, you need the ledger before he arrived. Napoli had existed since 1926 and had never won Serie A. Not once. The title had gone to Juventus, to the two Milan clubs, to Torino, to Internazionale, to Bologna, to Genoa — to the industrial north, almost without exception. Naples was the poor south, and the away terraces reminded it of that every season.

1986–87: Serie A and the Coppa Italia in the same season, the Coppa won 4–0 on aggregate against Atalanta. The first league title in the club's sixty-one years.

1988–89: the UEFA Cup, beaten Stuttgart over two legs. It remains, as of 2026, the only European trophy Napoli has ever won.

1989–90: the second Serie A title.

1990: the Supercoppa Italiana, 5–1 against Juventus — still the record winning margin in that competition as of 2026.

In 188 games for Napoli he scored 81 goals. The number is not what he is remembered for there. The club retired the number 10 shirt in 2000. On 4 December 2020, nine days after he died, the stadium was renamed the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona.

Argentina 2, England 1. Estadio Azteca, Mexico City, 114,580 people, four years after the Falklands war.

51st minute. Steve Hodge miscued a clearance back into his own penalty area. Maradona — eight inches shorter than Peter Shilton — went up with the goalkeeper and punched the ball into the net. The referee, Ali Bin Nasser of Tunisia, gave the goal.

At the press conference afterwards he said it had been scored "a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God." Years later he put it more plainly: "What hand of God? It was the hand of Diego."

He also described the minute after it went in: "I was waiting for my teammates to embrace me, and no one came. I told them, come hug me, or the referee isn't going to allow it."

55th minute. He collected the ball inside his own half, turned, and ran sixty yards past Beardsley, Reid, Butcher, Fenwick and Butcher again, then rounded Shilton and rolled it in. The whole thing took about ten seconds. In a 2002 FIFA poll it was voted the Goal of the Century; Michael Owen's goal against Argentina in 1998 came second.

His own account of it is almost a shrug: "I made the play to give it to Valdano, but when I got to the area they surrounded me and I had no space. Therefore, I had to continue the play and finish it myself."

Gary Lineker, who scored England's goal that afternoon: "When Diego scored that second goal against us, I felt like applauding. It was impossible to score such a beautiful goal. He's the greatest player of all time, by a long way."

He scored twice more against Belgium in the semi-final, both in the second half. In the final against West Germany, with the score at 2–2 and six minutes left, he threaded the pass that put Burruchaga clear for the winner. Argentina won 3–2 in front of 114,600.

Five goals and five assists in seven matches. Ten of Argentina's fourteen goals in that tournament came directly through him. He was given the Golden Ball and he lifted the trophy as captain.

Four years later he took a considerably worse Argentina side to another final, in Italy, in the stadium of the country whose league he had just won twice.

They lost it 1–0 to West Germany on 8 July 1990, to an eighty-fourth minute penalty given for a tackle by Roberto Sensini that most accounts since have called questionable. Guido Buchwald man-marked him for almost the whole match. Two Argentina players were sent off. At the final whistle Maradona burst into tears and blamed the referee.

In 1991 he failed a drug test for cocaine and was suspended for fifteen months. He left Napoli at the end of it and never played in Italy again.

Sevilla signed him for the 1992–93 season: twenty-six games, five goals. Newell's Old Boys took him for five matches and no goals. Boca Juniors brought him home in 1995 for thirty games and seven goals across two years.

At the 1994 World Cup in the United States he played two matches. He scored against Greece in a 4–0 win, and on 25 June he set up both goals in a 2–1 win over Nigeria. Then he failed a test for ephedrine and was expelled from the tournament. His trainer, he said, had bought a supplement called Ripped Fuel in the belief that it was the same as another product. The sanction was fifteen months.

The Nigeria match was the ninety-first and last of his international career.

He played his last match on 25 October 1997.

He died on 25 November 2020, aged sixty.

The years 1983 and 1984 have no rows: those are the Barcelona seasons, the ankle and the hepatitis. 1991 and 1992 have no rows either. That is the first ban.

Individual: World Cup Golden Ball 1986. World Youth Championship Golden Ball 1979. FIFA Player of the Century 2000, shared. Goal of the Century 2002. Second in World Soccer's 100 Greatest Players of the 20th Century, 1999.

Michel Platini: "Diego was capable of things no one else could match. The things I could do with a football, he could do with an orange."

Franco Baresi, who had to mark him twice a season in Serie A: "Maradona; when he was on form, there was almost no way of stopping him."

Paolo Maldini: "He was a model of good behaviour on the pitch — he was respectful of everyone, from the great players down to the ordinary team member. He was always getting kicked around and he never complained — not like some of today's strikers."

Jorge Valdano, who played alongside him in 1986: "Maradona was a technical leader: a guy who resolved all difficulties that may come up on the pitch."

Gabriel Batistuta: "Diego could command a stadium, have everyone watch him. I played with him and I can tell you how technically decisive he was for the team."

Zlatan Ibrahimović: "When you see number 10 who do you think about? Maradona. It is a symbol."

Guillem Balagué, writing for the BBC after his death, made the point the statistics hide: "Today his skills would afford him greater protection. Back then they merely served as the red rag of provocation that would guarantee he would be the victim of brutal challenges wherever he played. The rules changed as a direct result of some of the injuries Maradona received."

In 2000, FIFA ran a poll for Player of the Century. The internet vote gave Maradona 53.6% and Pelé 18.53%. A second round, decided by a football committee and magazine subscribers, gave Pelé 72.75%. FIFA declared them joint winners and satisfied nobody.

In May 2022 the shirt he wore against England sold at auction for £7.1 million — a world record for any piece of sporting memorabilia.

He scored 259 goals in 491 club games. It is a good return and not an extraordinary one, and it is beside the point. What he has instead is a city in the Italian south that renamed its stadium after him, a goal a global poll called the greatest ever scored, and another one four minutes earlier that he put in with his hand and never quite apologised for.