The Death of Diego Maradona

Diego Armando Maradona died on November 25, 2020, at a rented house in Tigre, a suburb north of Buenos Aires where he had been recovering under home care. He was 60 years old. Argentine authorities confirmed the cause as cardiac arrest and acute pulmonary edema, coming barely two weeks after he had undergone surgery to remove a subdural hematoma, a buildup of blood on the surface of his brain. He had been discharged from that operation and moved into round-the-clock nursing care rather than a hospital, and questions about the adequacy of that care afterward led Argentine prosecutors to open a homicide-culpa investigation into several members of his medical team, a case that dragged on for years without resulting in convictions against most of those charged.

News of his death triggered an outpouring of grief that crossed football’s usual rivalries. Argentina’s government declared three days of national mourning, and tens of thousands of fans lined up outside the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, where his body lay in state, some waiting more than twelve hours to file past the coffin before crowd surges forced an early closure of public viewing. In Naples, where Maradona had delivered the only two Serie A titles in the history of the city’s club, SSC Napoli, fans built shrines in the streets, and the club renamed its stadium the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona within days, on December 4, 2020. FIFA, UEFA, and clubs across the world held moments of silence before matches that weekend.

Maradona’s death closed out a career whose brilliance and self-destruction were inseparable from each other. He rose from the shantytowns of Villa Fiorito outside Buenos Aires to become, by broad consensus, one of the two greatest footballers in history, sharing FIFA’s Player of the Century award with Pele in 2000. His defining moment came at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, where he almost single-handedly carried Argentina to the title, scoring the “Hand of God” goal against England with an illegal fist to the ball that the referee missed, followed minutes later in the same match by a mazy, 60-yard solo run past five English defenders that is still regularly ranked the greatest goal in World Cup history. At club level, he transformed Napoli from a perennial also-ran into Italian champions in 1987 and 1990, a feat still celebrated in the city decades on.

That brilliance ran alongside decades of struggle with cocaine addiction, which first became public during his years in Naples and later contributed to a 15-month worldwide ban from football in 1991 after he failed a doping test, and to his expulsion from the 1994 World Cup in the United States after testing positive for banned stimulants. He cycled through rehabilitation stints, weight swings, and health crises for the rest of his life, including a near-fatal cocaine-induced heart attack in 2004, while remaining a folk-hero figure across Argentina and, for many, in poorer neighborhoods across the Global South who saw in his rise and his flaws a story more relatable than the polished careers of many of his contemporaries. His death left Argentine and world football mourning a player whose genius on the ball was never fully separable from the chaos that surrounded his life off it.