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It is one of those news that in an instant blows to Barcelona: Diego Maradona is dead, when children play football the shock mixes with the memories of an entire generation of parents. A southern Italian says he should have worked that night, but his local business partner had just asked him sensitively: Should we postpone? He is a southern Italian, but not a Napoli fan either.
Argentine football sage Jorge Valdano, Maradona’s teammate in the 1986 World Cup victory and Spanish television expert, must interrupt his transition from the Champions League when asked about Maradona because tears leave him speechless. The family of the then World Cup coach Carlos Bilardo turned off the television to hide the fatal news from the seriously ill elderly man. In Argentina, a three-day state mourning is proclaimed and in the second home of Maradona, Naples, the mayor announces the renaming of the local stadium. And around the world there have been discussion groups like those of the parents of football in Barcelona on Wednesday night.
Maradona and Bernd Schuster, who played together in Barça, were friends
Photo: images imago / Sven Simon
Even if they have a special touch here: after all, Maradona also played for Barça. And so almost everyone knows someone who can talk about Maradona negotiations, movie-like thief guns. Or someone who worked on the support staff at Barca when Maradona juggled a hundred times in the cabin with an orange on his foot, head and shoulder. When teammates joked that anyone could do it with an orange, they did the same thing again with a lime.
The audience came to watch him warm up
From 1982 to 1984 he played in Barcelona: in Argentina, before Napoli. It was the only year the crowd came to Camp Nou half an hour before kick-off, just to see them warm up. Two years, 38 goals, a victory in the Spanish Cup, a “hepatitis” – more on the quotes – and another long pause for what is perhaps the most famous foul in football history.
Two intense years, two years Maradona. “Apart from getting pregnant”, says his teammate at the time, Lobo Carrasco, “everything happened to him here.”
In 1982 Maradona, 21, stepped off the plane in a blue two-piece suit and a brown leather bag in hand and in his first interview was stunned by the unimaginably high transfer fee of around six million dollars. In the third attempt, Barça kicked him out of Argentina. The first time in 1978 you did not have enough money, the second time the Argentine military dictatorship prohibited the transfer. Now, in the summer of the World Cup in Spain, the time has come.
Looking back, it can be said that Maradona is experiencing a miniature crash course in Barcelona in everything that will later make him so momentous in Naples. The interest of the media is enormous, as are the pitfalls.
Kicked almost unconscious from behind
Maradona arrives with his wife and family, soon more and more friends will follow. They talk about the “clan” in Barcelona. Club officials report that up to 40 people can be found in Maradona’s home above the city when his wife is not there. They also allegedly get light girls from the evil center. After a great start to the season for Maradona, Barça were in first place when he fell ill. The official version is hepatitis. To this day, insiders speak of the fact that it was actually a sexually transmitted disease.
“If Diego had always been fit and stayed longer, we would have won the European Cup three or four times in a row – he was much better than the others,” says his teammate Julio Alberto in the Spanish TV documentary “FC Maradona “. Without him, however, the German coach Udo Lattek loses his job and Barça wins the championship. In the second season is similar under the compatriot of Maradona César Luis Menotti. Even if this time Maradona is innocent.
Maradona with his German coach Udo Lattek at FC Barcelona
Photo: imago sportfotodienst / imago images / WEREK
If you see pictures of the fouls committed on him today, they look downright unreal in their merciless brutality. Also and above all Spain at the time was not a tiki-taka country, but dotted with tough defenders, given that Maradona had already met the Italian Claudio Gentile at the World Cup. “I know there are a lot of gentiles, but I trust the Spanish referees,” he says at the beginning. He trusts in vain.
In September 1983, Athletic Bilbao’s Andoni Goikoetxea, who two years earlier had already pushed another Barça star to the operating table with Bernd Schuster, kicked him from behind, almost passed out. “Someone has to die before something changes”, complains the coach Menotti.
Just as everything is global in Maradona, so will this foul. Due to the general outrage, the “butcher of Bilbao” will be suspended for 18 games, and although he will only have to serve six, that evening begins a process that ends with better protection of the striker in world football.
Maradona herself should experience it to the fullest in the early stages of the race: this is another reason why comparisons over time, for example with Lionel Messi, are so useless. Just so much: when today’s Barça fans are the protagonists here in the round as the best player in history, then there is probably also the sublimated ignorance of an uncomfortable thought: that you messed up Maradona.
After Maradona’s failure for months, it’s only enough for the cup final in his second season. After beating Real Madrid in 1983, the worst possible opponent awaits in 1984: Bilbao. Before that, both sides provoked, kicked back onto the pitch, and after Barça’s 1-0 defeat, revanchism derailed in a pitched battle in which Maradona attacked opponents with kung-fu kicks. It will be his last match with Barça.
Due to the anticipated ban, the increasingly uncomfortable press and the broken relationship with President Núñez, both sides see a change as the most sensible thing to do. Napoli pays about eight million dollars and Maradona walks with his head held high.
What remains are inexplicable dribbles, crosses with high kicks and two mythical goals. One at Real Madrid, when he only has to push the ball into the empty goal, but first lets his opponent Juan José slip into the void (and later in the game he apologizes for slamming his man on the post). As well as a single lob in the Champions Cup to the Red Star of Belgrade: from the run from the edge of the penalty area in the high arc of a three-point shot in basketball, acclaimed by 100 thousand Yugoslav fans in the “little Maracanã”.
“I don’t care what you’ve done with your life. I care what you did with mine “
Maradona’s former teammate Monchi Rodríguez
What remains, however, is also the memory of a person who paved the way as a leader at a young age. “You will not find anyone on the team at the time who speaks ill of Diego,” said forward Paco Clos. A person who has been loved, adored and seduced. What remains is the entrance to parties and cocaine. There are observers who claim to have seen it consumed early in the days of Barça, while others trace its entry to the last few weeks in the city. It allegedly appeared in a police report to President Núñez.
Towards the end of his career, Maradona played another season in Spain with Sevilla FC. The then substitute goalkeeper and today’s sporting director Monchi Rodríguez cited a phrase on Wednesday as a farewell that at least one generation can sign without hesitation: “I don’t care what you’ve done with your life. I care what you did with mine. ”
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