Former soccer player, coach and sports commentator Jorge Valdano recalls that the day Diego Armando Maradona died, on November 25, 2020, he was in Madrid about to participate in the television broadcast of a Champions League match. He learned from the newspaper EL PAÍS of the death of his friend. “There is something perverse in a life that fulfills all your dreams and he suffered the generosity of his destiny like no one else. It was the fatal journey from his human condition to that of myth that divided him in two “, he wrote with flying pen for the article published that same day in the newspaper, while he was going to the stadium. He thought that, after releasing all his emotions, he could do his job, but in the live connection he broke again when asked about his partner.

With this memory narrated by himself he begins Maradona’s last days. It’s about a podcast Six-episode Spotify original produced by Adonde Media. In it, Valdano presents a chronological and often personal account of Maradona’s latest soccer adventures and what his final experiences were like. Look at Diego father, friend and idol. And he tells how he witnessed a few meters away the famous hand of God of the World Cup in Mexico 86.

The 12 months that have passed since the death of the Argentine have been enough for them to appear podcasts, series, films and books that analyze from different points of view the figure of El Pelusa and that tumultuous journey that, as Valdano said in his farewell text, transformed the person into an icon.

Maradona is, even for those who are not football lovers, a great narrative character, who passed through heaven and hell during his lifetime. Many of them count for a second podcast dedicated to his figure, The ball does not get dirty, which Podimo Latino released a few days before his death. In it, the journalist and biographer of the athlete, Lalo Zanoni, constructs a non-chronological account with which he explains his influence beyond the field of play. As an example, it recreates in one of its 10 chapters what it considers the most important game in the star’s career. In his opinion, it is Italy against Argentina of the Italy 90 World Cup. Maradona was at that time the great star of Naples and his team had to play precisely in that stadium, no less than against the host. Hours before the game, the footballer took advantage of the historical contempt that the Italian north showed to the south of the country. In a statement to the press, he recalled that Naples was also Italy and asked his club’s followers to support Argentina, even if it was not their homeland. Not all complied with his request and even apologized for it, but his cunning managed to fracture the local fans and also win the match by scoring the winning goal on penalties.

While Valdano’s story for Spotify is intimate and restrained, that of Zanoni for Podimo Latino at times maintains the rhythm of sports broadcasts. “If football is music, Maradona is Frank Sinatra and Carlos Gardel. If football is rhythm, Diego is Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson, because in addition to the ball, the 10th loves music “, begins one of the episodes of The ball does not get dirty, which also explores the daily life of the world champion.

Many of the details that Zanoni recounted in his 2006 book Live in the media. Maradona off the record (Tide) appear in the newly released Amazon Studios series Maradona blessed dream, a canonical biography that intersperses the life of the soccer player with the history of his country, the death of Juan Domingo Perón to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Videla dictatorship or the Malvinas War. Divided into 10 episodes, three actors embody its protagonist: Juan Palomino, Nazareno Casero and Nicolás Goldschmidt. The story runs through two times in parallel. On the one hand, the moment in which the world champion suffers an overdose in Punta del Este in 2000. On the other, his professional promotion from the arrival of his first team at the age of nine, Argentinos Juniors, nicknamed Los Cebollitas, to the debut in the national team of his country by the hand of César Luis Menotti, played by Darío Grandinetti, and his success in Europe.

Same as him podcast The ball does not get dirty, the series shows a fundamental issue to understand the trajectory of its protagonist: the success of someone who came from origins as humble as his own represented an authentic class struggle. “Che Guevara said that a good revolutionary was one who felt as his own the injustices that were committed in any part of the world. I don’t know if Che would have liked to be Maradona. But Diego would have loved to be Che ”, Fernando Signorini, his former personal fitness trainer and author of a new book, explained to this newspaper at the beginning of December. Diego from within (Planet).

A proof of the enormous influence of the Pibe de Oro —the list of nicknames of the athlete is proportional to the passions that he unleashed—, constitutes it It was the hand of God, the new film by one of the great names in current European cinema, Paolo Sorrentino. The production, whose premiere on December 15 on Netflix, takes place as it passes through the cinemas on the 3rd of this month, relies on fiction to narrate a real tragedy, the death of his parents as a teenager. He does so through the story of a young Neapolitan in the eighties in which he could not miss, despite everything, his football idol. The filmmaker’s most intimate film, although not the most celebrated by critics, is precisely traversed by Diego Armando Maradona.

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