It is wildly inaccurate to describe – as some have – Maradona’s Napoli as a one-man team. The less faith they had in me or us, the angrier I was and the harder I played.” “I knew I was going to suffer – a lot – but I also knew that the harder something is, the more I like it. “Napoli were, in football terms, closer to the second division than to a championship,” he recalled. Napoli themselves had narrowly avoided relegation in 1982-84 – finishing a point above the drop zone just weeks before he signed. Before his arrival, a team from the southern mainland had never won the Scudetto. What Maradona achieved with Napoli was truly incredible. His divine status would be consecrated by his heroics at the club over the next seven years. He then booted the ball into the enraptured crowd and departed with a “ Forza Napoli” (“Come on Napoli”).Īlready, it felt like Maradona had become a living God – just as Juliano had predicted. I am very happy to be with you,” were his first words before he treated everyone to a keepie-uppie taster. With a Napoli scarf around his neck, he addressed his doting faithful. His first shot at the San Paolo was sumptuously curled into the top corner from 35 yards. To chants of ‘ Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole, Diego, Diego’, he waved and blew kisses to the crowd, who put on a pyrotechnic display that would have rivalled the eruption of Mount Vesuvius herself. He arrived from the heavens of Naples’ blue summer sky by helicopter, the stadium overflowing with 70,000 fanatical fans chanting “ Ho visto Maradona, ho visto Maradona.” (‘I saw Maradona, I saw Maradona’).ĭressed casually with a white t-shirt and blue chinos, he scaled the steps from the San Paolo’s interior to return to the centre of the pitch which was encircled by over 100 journalists and cameramen. The hysteria of Diego’s presentation as a Napoli player on Jwould only enhance this feeling. There had been hunger strikes and people had chained themselves to the fence at San Paolo stadium, begging me to come. A lot of things reminded me of my origins. “Naples was a crazy city – they were as crazy as me – soccer was life itself. “I felt that they loved me, that they really and truly loved me,” he revealed in his autobiography, ‘Touched by God’. All together, they helped make up the difference and the deal was done. The Neapolitan people responded by making collections in the streets – from the notoriously crowded tenements of the Spanish Quarter to the Camorra-run district of Forcella. This became clear to Maradona when, despite Juliano agreeing a world-record fee to sign the Argentine, Barcelona president Josep Lluis Nunez moved the goalposts at the last minute by demanding an extra £500,000 for the deal to go through. A legend during 15 years as a player with his hometown club, Juliano rather prophetically told Maradona he would become a “living God” if he joined the Partenopei – and that his people would die for him. The man who travelled to Barcelona to negotiate Maradona’s signing, Napoli sporting director Antonio Juliano, was from the slums of Naples himself. “I want to become the idol of the poor children of Naples because they are like I was when I lived in Buenos Aires,” El Pibe de Oro would say on his first day as a player there. It was a dysfunctional, downtrodden, yet hugely passionate city – particularly when it came to football – that suffered from mass poverty, unemployment and organised crime, and was depicted as a stain on Italy by the aristocratic, industrial north. In Naples, he would find a team, city and public that endured the same problems as he did growing up. During his two years in Spain’s fiercely separatist Barcelona he had been made to feel an outcast, branded by locals as a ‘ Sudaca’ – a derogatory term for a dark-skinned South American. His former club – and that of his heart in Argentina – Boca Juniors were the team of the working class who battled against the team of the upper class, River Plate. Maradona would always side with the poor and the oppressed throughout his life. Maradona’s bricklayer father Don Diego went to work at 4am each day and, in the words of his son, “arrived home dead”. As Asif Kapadia’s much-anticipated film on Maradona – June 14 in the UK and July 25 in Australia – shows in graphic detail, there was no clean water, no paved roads and the impoverished residents had to labour around the clock just to survive. He had grown up in extreme poverty in Villa Fiorito, an overpopulated shantytown in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. But, above all else, there was unconditional love that – 35 years on from their first date together – has never wavered.įrom day one, Diego immediately felt at home in Naples. There were so many blissful highs yet also some distressing lows. None more so than Diego Armando Maradona and SSC Napoli. Some couples are just meant to be together.
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