The Game's
Most Epic Life

An interview by Matt Dickinson

Diego Maradona is thinking about how he wants to be remembered. The words that he might want as his epitaph. “On my gravestone?!” he exclaims, laughing. “Not yet, not for a long time I hope.”

The laughter, the mischief, the defiance, Maradona’s extraordinary charisma – they could leave an indelible mark just like the peerless talents with a ball at his feet.

To have caught up with Maradona – to have sat down and talked about goals and trophies, life and love, grasping the World Cup and how the pleas of his daughters dragged him back from addiction – was to experience a life-force as rare as his breathtaking skills.

This was a man, a leader, who would not yield to anyone. “What a player, what a great player I could have been if I’d taken care of myself!” he said. “If I’d looked after myself I would have been ten times the player Pele was! There would have been no comparison. I would have had Pele in my pocket if I’d taken care of myself!” He dared you to disagree. Few did.

People ask what it was like to meet and interview Maradona. As well as being complicated – he once left a journalist to wait 24 hours in a hotel lobby for an interview – it was worth any amount of trouble. Most of us spend our lives compromising, conforming, fitting in. Maradona oozed outrageousness, rebellion, fearlessness. He was 5ft 5ins but with a towering personality. The words tumbled out of him, unfiltered.

“I’m a kid from the ‘potrero’, the streets. My popularity will never
decrease because I come from the people, I’m one of them.”

There was so much to discuss given that Maradona squeezed ten lives into his 60 years: arguably the world’s greatest ever footballer, certainly the game’s most epic life. His popularity went beyond even his magnificent sporting accomplishments of leading Argentina to World Cup triumph in 1986, and lifting Napoli, and Naples, to unprecedented glories. Many footballers become heroes: Maradona was a populist icon. “I’m a kid from the ‘potrero’, the streets,” he explained. “My popularity will never decrease because I come from the people, I’m one of them.”

To have visited Villa Fiorito, the shanty town outside Buenos Aires where Maradona was born and raised, was to grasp how his life was transformed like few others; from a shack to superstardom. In a game becoming ever more global, he was blazing a trail as the game’s best player and its most compelling star even before the crowning glory of 1986.

That must have been daunting? “On leaving Fiorito I was taken to Paris, straight to the top of the Eiffel Tower they took me,” he said. “Me, from Fiorito, I said to myself, where am I? But I was never scared. I was never scared because my truth was always on the pitch. It was in playing the game and entertaining the crowd.”
On the pitch, he was a man in supreme control. As leader of Argentina, he carried the hopes and expectations of more than 30 million people. In Naples, he was not just winning trophies but elevating a downtrodden city. 

“In Italy, Naples is like a different country,” Maradona explained. “So I saw this as my own personal protest towards the north, and those who had the power. I could beat the ones who wielded the power and be the flag of the south. That was a source of personal pride for me.”

He was a symbol of the underdog, imagining himself as a sporting Che Guevara – the revolutionary whose face was tattooed on to his upper arm. He liked the good life, too, though his wealth was nothing compared to the superstars of today.

“Ooh, do you know how much I’d be worth now?!” he exclaimed. “I think that today I’d be worth a lot of money.”

Does it upset you, I wondered, that you don’t have $100 million in the bank like Messi or Ronaldo? “No, because I think everyone has their own time,” he said. “Everyone says to me that I should have been born in this current era, but I say ‘but then I would have missed out on the other one!’ And I was happy. I don’t want to be in Cristiano Ronaldo’s era and Cristiano Ronaldo couldn’t be in mine.

“Today, salaries have really taken off, but that’s fine. As long as it’s the players that earn them then no problem. I prefer the players who delight the crowd to earn the money, rather than some club president coming along simply to take money off the fans.”

If these were the words of a man of the people, there was the dark side, too. I wondered if Maradona ever feared that he had eroded his popularity in the drug use that was a fleeting experiment while at Barcelona, and then a habit and eventually an addiction in Naples. Maradona did not shy away from the question. Nothing is off-limits when you talk to Maradona.

“Drugs?” he said. “It’s a worldwide reality. It’s not like it’s just me who has gone through this. There is a worldwide reality that millions and millions of dollars are spent on drugs. Millions and millions of dollars on cigarettes, millions and millions of dollars on alcohol. I’m not the one who discovered it and it won’t die along with me.”

But what of his position as a hero to millions? Was there not a responsibility to set an example? Accepting the challenge, Maradona scoffed at the idea that he was a role model to anyone other than his daughters, Dalma and Giannina.

“As the people’s idol I can’t go into everyone’s home,” he said. “It’s the parents who are role models. I would feel really bad if Dalma or Giannina followed the example of Britney Spears, but it’s not Britney Spears’ fault.

“I want to clear this up because I didn’t take anyone with me, or force anyone to do anything. The only person I harmed was myself and when I did, I shut myself away and the ones who suffered were Claudia and the girls. When I hit rock bottom, instead of going to find someone to come and take drugs with me, I preferred to hide myself away and just do damage to myself and rack my own brains.

“And I didn’t seek to gain any advantage by taking drugs, it was just the opposite. The drugs that I was taking actually held me back, and I carried on playing in the same way and faced up to it, and I tried to entertain the fans who were in the ground. That’s why I’m the one they love the most at Napoli, everyone at Boca respects me, people respect me wherever I played. As for the national side, I’m the biggest representative in football terms that Argentina has. So I really can’t ask for more than that.

“I never betrayed the game. Wherever I go in the world today, people remember things I’ve done on the field, things they would love to have done themselves.

“The proof of this affection: I hadn’t played in the Olympic Stadium in Rome in the 18 years since the 1990 World Cup Final, and I went to play there at the age of 47 [in 2008 in a charity match] and I received the biggest ovation a player could ever get.”

If he had regrets, it was nothing to do with football but family. Those years when he was lost to addiction, in intensive care in 2004, were painful to recall, but Maradona did so, exposing his vulnerability. 

“I can tell you that I lost out on many years with my daughters, and you can’t buy that time with all the money in the world,” he said, ruefully. “So if there’s something which I really regret in life, it would be not having experienced with my daughters what I should have experienced, as a result of my illness. But thank the Lord that the moment came and today I’m able to enjoy my time with them.

Could anything in life match the joy of an amazing goal, like that one he scored against England in the World Cup quarter-final in 1986?

“A kiss from my daughter,” he said. “There’s nothing that makes me happier than that. I can’t find happiness on the field anymore because I haven’t got the legs and I’m too big now, and so now I look for spiritual contentment and I get that in a kiss from Dalma and Giannina.