Film - Diego Maradona

Whether you worship the footballer as a god or think he’s a bit of an eejit or anything in between this is a fascinating look at the rise and inevitable fall of the volatile footballer. I probably fall towards the latter category as it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job; you have to be an all-round good guy to earn my respect.

And messing about with gangsters, taking drugs and not acknowledging you have a child does not earn you that, never mind any kind of god-status. And that’s before we talk about the cheating on the pitch, and yet we see many depictions of Maradona as Jesus himself. However, in this documentary, we also see the Maradona that lacks confidence off the pitch, has no idea who he can trust and painfully, what to do with his time. It’s the lingering, tell-tale close-ups that make this is a fascinating film.

We are introduced to Diego Maradona as a ‘black kid from the slums’ of Buenos Aires finding comfort in football. When he gets signed as a young teen, he moves his entire family into the flat he acquires and it’s a fast upward trajectory from here on in, one where he never forgets to call his mum after every major achievement.

"The poorest city in Italy buys the most expensive player in the world."

It quickly weaves through international glory and hurtles into him playing for Napoli after, a brief unproductive time at the footballing giant, Barcelona. In Italy, he has yet another rise and fall, hailed as a hero at first and then as a waste of space some time later.

We watch his world change as he steps up to play for Argentina on his adopted Italian soil and knock them out of Italia 90. Even I know never to come between Italians and their football and yet here, he is loved so much, I’m stunned to see even Italians are torn although eventually, this lead to his downfall, not helped by the terrible racism of the north/south divide very much evident in the 1980s.

Much has been written about Maradona and yet some of this film, pieced together from 500 hours of footage, was new to me. If you’re a football fan, it may answer one or two lingering questions. Otherwise, it’s a a fascinating, though sad, documentary, much of it told through Maradona’s gestures, rather than words.

8/10