Maradona the Messiah: part two
Last week's post looked at why Maradona means so much to Argentina; this week considers him as a quasi-religious and political figure akin to Gauchito Gil or Juan Perón
Last week’s piece about Diego Maradona and why he means so much to Argentina and Argentinians, predictably, drew a number of responses on social media along the lines of “he was a disgraceful cheat; why are you talking about him?” All, obviously, were from English people and so presumably England fans.
Such a response is, clearly, ludicrous, reductive, boring. However frustrating it may be that he punched the ball past Peter Shilton in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final, no one incident can ever entirely define a man. It wasn’t even Maradona’s only high-profile handball. He also won a penalty for Napoli after a handball in the 1989 Uefa Cup final against Stuttgart, and then batted an Oleh Kuznetsov handball off the line against the USSR in the group stage in 1990. Deliberate handball is not good, obviously, but is it worse than the repeated brutal tackles Maradona suffered throughout his career, including in that game against England? Perhaps it is, but the discussion is at least worth having. A knee-jerk “He’s a cheat!” is the response of the playground – the sort of self-serving response, in fact, Maradona himself would often make in the face of adversity.
Nor are handballs anything like the worst thing Maradona did. As the Argentinian essayist Maria Rosa Lojo, considering Maradona’s role as a sort of secular saint, asked, “How can it be possible that an individual denoted for his athletic brilliance and his deficiencies in other areas be deemed worthy of such worship? Apart from his professional talent, what is there to glorify or emulate in a man who disowned some of his own children, who was accused of violence against women, who indulged in his overconsumptions and his addictions?”
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My history of the World Cup, The Power and the Glory, is out now. Order here. Or, for those who dislike Amazon, here.
Postcards from the Past continues with Episode 13: the incredible rise of Bodø/Glimt
Bodø: The incredible rise of Glimt
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29 Oct
Based north of the Arctic Circle, Bodø/Glimt’s location effectively disbarred them from the Norwegian top division until 1972. By the 1980s Glimt weren’t even the best team in Bodø. But the arrival of Kjetil Knutsen as manager changed everything and they’re now a four-time Norwegian champion. All that, plus the reason they swapped a hyphen for an oblique stroke.
Episode 14 follows next Wednesday. For the full archive of Postcards from the Past, go here.
On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we look at the use of data in football. Listen here.
On Libero, we consider the state of the Old Firm. Listen here.
A new project with Tifo: an animation charting the entire history of football. Episode Six, about the golden age of Central European football and how the Nazis ended it is here.
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That is the far more interesting question. Here is a man, perhaps the greatest exponent in history of the most popular cultural mode there has ever been. He is deeply flawed, has treated many of those around him appallingly, and yet he inspires devotion. Maradona is certainly not unique in this, not even in football, but the degree of devotion he inspires probably is. James Horncastle described on Libero visiting the shrine that has been opened to Maradona at the stadium of Argentinos Juniors, his first cub, and seeing a stack of valid credit cards, people effectively saying, “Take what you want.”
Lojo’s response is that it is precisely the flaws that make Maradona seem worthy of secular canonisation. She tells the story of Guachito Gil, a mythical 19th-century figure who was conscripted into the Argentinian army during the War of the Triple Alliance. One night he dreamt that God had told him not to kill innocent people so deserted, going on the run and living as a bandit. He was captured, hanged upside down from a tree and his throat cut. Before he died, Gil told the executioner that when he went home he would find his son seriously ill. If he prayed for Gil’s intercession, though, the boy would be saved. Sure enough, the executioner returned home to find his son apparently dying, prayed and his son was miraculously saved, at which he returned to the site of execution and erected a shrine, establishing a cult that grew rapidly during the economic turbulence of Carlos Menem’s neoliberal reforms in the early 1990s.
A story is told that a man in love with his brother’s wife wrote Gil a letter about his torment, saying that he dared not tell God, but he could ask Gil for advice because he knew he would understand. Maradona, Lojo argues, was similarly accessible because of the “human fullness” he exhibited. Far easier to seek help from a sinner who understood frailty than a coldly perfect saint.
Argentina regularly turned to Maradona in times of crisis, often against all reason. Why was there such public demand for him to take over as national manager as World Cup qualifying went awry before South Africa 2010? He had a dreadful track record as a manager. Although late winners in their final two qualifiers did get them to the tournament, Maradona picked a bizarre squad that limped to the quarter-final before being hammered by Germany.
But even that wasn’t as weird as the demand, in the wake of the 5-0 defeat to Colombia at la Bombonera, for him to be restored to the national side. He was overweight and serving a drugs ban, but did come back, played just about well enough to get Australia into a play-off. He lost weight rapidly and looked in shape by the time the tournament in the USA came around, scored against Greece, screamed into the camera, and was then fatefully selected for the random drugs test after the second group game, against Nigeria.
It was at around that time that Maradona’s political status was at its height. Serving his ban, he was regarded as a martyred hero, the excesses that had made his wedding seem such an affront forgotten. As Menem was accused of hypocrisy – he had invoked gaucho imagery and presented himself as a man of a hero while campaigning, and then had governed with a series of almost Thatcherite reforms – Maradona seemed straightforward, honest. There was no careta to him. “I am the voice of those who don’t have a voice,” he said, “the voice of the many people who feel I represent them.”
And it made sense that it should be a footballer who should take on that mantle. It’s not just that football, as explained in last week’s post, soon became a vehicle of Argentinian self-projection. It’s that football clubs are one of the few institutions in Argentina that have not collapsed. When I was in Argentina last month, I spoke to four River Plate presidents, all of whom offered some variation on the line that while Argentina suffered seven coups in the twentieth century, at River democracy has never failed. Football has become an unexpected source of stability.
The journalist Carlos Ares even described Maradona as “the Perón of the nineties… a post-modern leader”, the greatest unifying force in Argentina. It helped, of course, that he didn’t have to get his hands dirty with the day-to-day business of governing rather than just making statements when the mood took him, but that tends to be true of populists. The identification with Perón was sealed in 1994 when that Maradona’s B sample was positive fell on the twentieth anniversary of the dictator’s death.
Perón too was a complex and conflicted man whose relationship with women was, at best, complicated. He too suffered dreadfully and caused great suffering. And Argentinians had profound faith in both long after it was reasonable to do so. Both answered their country’s call long past the peak of their powers, and both failed. And the legacy of both resonates now. Gil, as somebody who almost certainly never existed, is a far less problematic figure but Maradona has surpassed him, Evita and Perón as a secular saint, as is demonstrated even by the morbid fascination in the grotesque details of his death.
Whether Messi is a greater footballer can be debated; certainly he was more reliable and more consistent. But it’s Maradona who is venerated and surely Lojo is right when she says it is precisely his flaws, the fact that his genius took such an awful toll, that makes him so accessible.