RIP DIEGO MARADONA

[cosmicway 1,328]

Diego died yesterday in Argentina.
May God rest his soul.

[Johnnyeye 7,441]

One of the best players to ever grace the game of football. May he rest in peace 🙏🇦🇷⚽️🏆🔥

[Blues Forever 1,232]

One of the best player in the history, Maradona dragged almost single-handedly 2 average teams (Argentina & Napoli) to won WC & Serie A.

 

[cosmicway 1,328]

[Fulham Broadway 16,869]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

Great pic Cosmic - see how he towers above Maka 

[Atomiswave 6,072]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Great pic Cosmic - see how he towers above Maka 

I knew he was short but not that short haha....Joe Cole is a small guy and he looks like 2 heads taller wtf

[NikkiCFC 7,967]

Kusturica made a movie about him. Worth watching.

 

[OhForAGreavsie 5,895]

On 26/11/2020 at 6:05 AM, Johnnyeye said:

One of the best players to ever grace the game of football. May he rest in peace 🙏🇦🇷⚽️🏆🔥

For many years consensus opinion held that either Maradona or Pele was the best footballer of all time. These days of course most fans give that honour to Messi but I'm still a holdout for Maradona being better than his fellow Argentine. I measure that on achievements.

The Argentina squad of 1986 was not a patch on their 1978 World Cup winning counterparts and the 1990 crew was nearer to being a bad side than it was to being a great one. Much nearer. Even so Maradona led the '86 group to world cup triumph then dragged the 1990 collection back to the final. This was possibly the greatest achievement of Maradona's career. Argentina 1990 really were not good. Messi has had a much better supporting cast during his international career than Maradona enjoyed but he's achieved nothing.

Then there's Napoli. During their long history Naples has won just two Serie A titles. Both came when the side was led by Diego Maradona. Take Messi out of the great Barcelona, replace him with Maradona, and they still win everything in sight. Reverse the process and swap Maradona out for Messi in those Napoli and Argentina teams of the 80s/90s and what would you get? We'll never know but I do know what I think.

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My Top 10 All-Time

GKer

[Vesper 28,886]

16 hours ago, Blues Forever said:

One of the best player in the history, Maradona dragged almost single-handedly 2 average teams (Argentina & Napoli) to won WC & Serie A.

 

 

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Napoli players wear Diego Maradona No.10 shirts in tribute to club legend prior to Europa League clash against HNK Rijeka

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Packing more into 60 years than most would manage in 60 trillion

An icon. And that iconic image from 1986. Photograph: Carlo Fumagalli/AP

Rob Smyth

A LIFE LESS ORDINARY Wednesday was another triumph for the best breaking-news service in the business. At 4.10pm, The Fiver filed a Slow News Day special and wandered jauntily down to our illegally open local, the Failure & Acceptance, a place where there is no signal, no wifi and even less hope. At 4.25pm, as we were draining our second glass of Instant Decompresser, news broke to the outside world that Diego Maradona had died. This awful story finally reached us when we emerged, blinking into the sunlight, at 7.41am this morning. At first we hoped it was all a hoax, that he would appear on his balcony with an air rifle to tickle any journalists who had come to harass his family for a quote. Alas, it turned out the greatest GOAT of all time really had died. At this difficult time, our thoughts are with those who genuinely think they think Maradona wasn’t the best footballer ever. Spoiler alert: nobody will ever play better than he did at the 1986 World Cup; and nobody will ever empower ordinary teams to win the World Cup, Serie A (twice) and the Uefa Cup. He did it when football pitches were made of corrugated mud and GBH was a bookable offence at most. And he did it all without giving a solitary one what anyone else thought.

The best and worst moments of Diego Maradona’s turbulent career | Scott Murray Read more

Maradona was the most compelling sportsman of our lifetime. And, perhaps most importantly of all, nobody has ever given The Fiver as many deep, meaningful belly laughs. Our last memory of him in public is at the 2018 World Cup, when Argentina qualified from the group stage with a late winner against Nigeria. A TV director decided, not unreasonably, that it would be nice for billions of people around the world – especially the kids allowed to stay up late as a special treat – to see an icon like Maradona celebrate such a vital goal. What the director didn’t know was that, at the precise moment the camera cut to a palpably invigorated Maradona, he was unfurling both middle fingers and impatiently delivering a popular Spanish swearword to anyone within hearing or lip-reading range. It was Diego and his people versus the world, the way he always liked it. He’d be troubled by much of the goodwill towards him in the last 24 hours, certainly from the places he was hated and the people he had vaccinated. Maradona chatted a lot about “vaccinating” opponents, and he wasn’t talking as a qualified medical practitioner. He vaccinated England from the front and back in the Azteca in 1986, scoring two goals of unimaginable breadth in the space of a few minutes. Four years later he performed a savagely emphatic procedure on Brazil and the hosts Italy. If ever a life deserved celebration, it’s Maradona’s. The only regret is that he didn’t fulfil his other calling, as a Buddhist monk. Sure, if you want to nitpick, he might have struggled a wee bit with all that serenity and abstinence stuff, but he would have been a peerless meditation teacher. Nobody in human history has ever lived so defiantly in the moment. ‘Lived’ is the operative word: Maradona packed more into 60 years than most of us would manage in 60 trillion. As The Fiver reported exclusively at 7.42am this morning, Maradona is dead – but only in the medical sense. Somebody with his personality and genius will always be larger than death. Keep an eye on that balcony though, just in case, especially if you’re a journalist. QUOTE OF THE DAY “Today even the ball, the most inclusive, shared of toys, feels alone, inconsolably weeping for the loss of its owner, its master. All of those who love football, real football, cry with it. And those of us who knew him will cry even more for that Diego who, in recent times, had almost disappeared beneath the weight of his legend and his life of excess. Goodbye, great captain” – Jorge Valdano pays tribute to his former teammate and “God of football”. RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson, Philippe Auclair, Marcela Mora y Araujo and Asif Kapadia as Football Weekly Extra celebrates the life of El Diego. RECOMMENDED VIEWING

A father and daughter by the Obelisk in Buenos Aires. Photograph: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images

Two beautiful galleries: one on Maradona’s life and another on how fans around the world have reacted to his death. LIVE ON BIG WEBSITE Join Barry Glendenning now for red-hot minute-by-minute coverage of Molde 1-3 Arsenal, Braga 1-1 Leicester and Sparta Prague 1-0 Celtic, while Rob Smyth will be on hand later for Tottenham 2-0 Ludogorets and Rangers 1-1 Benfica. FIVER LETTERS “If only The Fiver had been late as usual it could have avoided the ignominy of declaring the day Maradona died to be ‘a very slow news day’” – Ian Copestake (and 1,056 others). “For all the sadness that Maradona’s death has generated, I am thankful today (Thanksgiving here in USA! USA!! USA!!!) that he played when he did. Today, a player of his luminescence and individuality wouldn’t get anywhere near the league leaders in any of the European leagues. The noughties and beyond have sadly made zeros of heroes like him. Shine on you crazy diamante, Diego!” – Justin Kavanagh. “If God really is an Englishman, Diego Maradona is going to have a nasty surprise when he gets to the Pearly Gates, isn’t he?” – Bruce G Bradley, USA! USA!! USA!!! “Instead of printing the same letter (Ian Potter) two days in a row to fill space why not just make up a letter from ‘Noble Francis’ like you usually do?” – Keiron Fulop. Send your letters to [email protected]. And you can always tweet The Fiver via @guardian_sport. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’the day is … Justin Kavanagh. NEWS, BITS AND BOBS

The San Paolo stadium in Naples. Photograph: Alessandro Garofalo/AP

There has been an outpouring of grief in Naples to Maradona’s death and on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. After the government announced new tiering measures for England on Thursday, 10 top-flight clubs – including those in London and Liverpool – will be able to welcome a limited number of fans into their grounds from next week. Newcastle are not one of those and they’ve been hit with the added complication of three positive Covid-19 tests before their trip to Selhurst Park on Friday. And clubs in Scotland still remain out of pocket from last season. STILL WANT MORE? Oh! Diego! Jonathan Wilson explains why Maradona fulfilled a prophecy, while Marcela Mora y Araujo writes about the lasting impact he has had in Argentina. From Mexico 86 to shooting journalists with an air rifle, here’s Scott Murray’s verdict on the best and worst moments of a turbulent career, and do enjoy Diego’s best bits in our bumper edition of Classic YouTube. What has happened to Anthony Martial this season? Josh Wright has the answers. David Hytner on Gareth Southgate’s new book and his determination to ignore the suggestion he should have become a travel agent. From toilets to 50cm seats, Paul MacInnes explains what clubs are doing to prepare for the return of supporters. Barney Ronay imagines a world without Gordon Taylor. Oh, and if it’s your thing … you can follow Big Website on Big Social FaceSpace. And INSTACHAT, TOO! THE LAST LINE MUST GO TO DIEGO

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Diego and Maradona

https://theathletic.com/2222291/2020/11/25/diego-and-maradona/

“When you’re on the pitch, life goes away. Problems go away. Everything goes away” — Diego Maradona, 1960-2020

Those words, uttered by Diego Armando Maradona over slow-motion images of his artistry, carry immense poignancy. This mythical player, surrounded by madness that bloated and blurred the boundaries between his professional career and chaotic personal life, was able to escape when he played. The noise faded. The claustrophobia lifted. Only now can we appreciate how much we should be thankful he found something blissful in those moments on the pitch as well as the rest of us.

In a way, the reason Maradona means so much to the masses is that he embodied escapism for anyone who cherished his genius. In Argentina they lived for his impassioned World Cups. In Napoli they prayed for wild Sundays at Stadio San Paolo. Even outside of his spiritual homes, only a fool would take their eyes off Maradona. His draw was magnetic because at any moment something incredible could happen. That possibility was an essential part of him and his operatic relationship with football.

Maradona danced. The way he moved with a football, a tango of his own design propelled by his own rhythms, leading the game with bursts and flourishes that were uniquely his, was something to behold. Nobody has ever moved with a football as Maradona did. Not before. Not since. He was able to elevate the game of football with his own intoxicating interpretation of how to play.

At his best, he played with an otherworldliness. It was sorcery. He seemed at one with the ball in a way that felt different to everybody else. Playful. Mischievous. Determined. Balanced. Charged. He propelled himself and the ball forward as one. Obstacles were there to be deceived, teased, outmanoeuvred with that pumped-up mix of blessed talent, street-fighting instincts and precocious, bare-faced cheek. As Jorge Valdano put it, “No ball ever had a better experience than when it was at his left foot.”

The milestones of his life in football are boldly etched in the game’s history. It takes a rare combination of ability and personality to carry a team towards the most glittering prizes. The abundance of both in Maradona fuelled him. The boy who left the poverty of Villa Fiorito, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, to chase his dreams was thrust to centre stage at a prodigious age. A professional debut for Argentinos Juniors at 15, the opportunity to sparkle for the national team at 16. One of his regrets was that he was not trusted at 17, despite his obvious brilliance, to take part in the 1978 World Cup hosted by Argentina. He was one of three culled from the list by Cesar Luis Menotti. Maradona wept like a child.

That day he spent an hour alone, outside, leaning on a fence and staring into the distance. While it was big news in his homeland this exclusion, back then he was not a global sensation. That level of intrigue and notoriety would not, however, take long to find him. Within a couple of years he played at Wembley and it was noted by the Sunday Times that “Maradona kept possession of the ball for two minutes and 10 seconds of continuous action”.

Echoing the shockwaves of the Magical Magyars in 1953, the Hungarian team who forced observers to re-evaluate what they thought about football, here was a teenager from Argentina doing remarkably different things. His dextrous control, his searing dribbling, his unshakable balance, his effortless dominance. He was a redefining footballer.

Of course, the World Cup was a driving force. For the best player of his era — arguably any era — who didn’t make the cut in his teens as his compatriots hoisted the trophy it was the holiest grail. Finding a way to overcome the targeted rough tackling he endured during his first World Cup experience in 1982 was a challenge. He didn’t just rise to it. In 1986 Maradona soared, with all of his might — and some of God’s, as he would have it — propelling him along.

The 1986 World Cup is Maradona’s World Cup. With the captain’s armband strapped to his No 10 shirt he scored or assisted 10 of Argentina’s 14 goals. Of course he made the most dribbles. Of course he was fouled a record number of times. He had to be brave to evade and bounce back from fearful kicks. He had to be resourceful to create and score by any means possible. He played the best, sang the loudest, partied the hardest and became a national deity.

Look at the impishness to score against Italy, bursting in at an angle to outfox the last defender and dink a perfectly placed volley. Re-watch those yin/yang goals against England which are the stuff of legend and infamy.

Sir Alf Ramsey saw fit to remark on how it made him supreme but also undermined him. “Pele had nearly everything. Maradona has everything,” he observed. “He works harder, does more and is more skilful. Trouble is that he’ll be remembered for another reason. He bends the rules to suit himself.”

The paradox of Maradona’s art, the particular charge that comes from his mix of beauty and beast, has always made the story more complex, more compulsive.

On he went. His goals saw off Belgium in the semi-finals and the way he hurtled at full speed — at the exact point where he could maintain balance without losing a millisecond of velocity — is classic Maradona. Then, despite being double marked in the final against West Germany, his speed of thought and vision enabled him to jab a defence-splitting pass for the winning goal.

Boca Juniors was the club of his boyhood fantasy and, while spells at Barcelona and Sevilla were fraught at times, Napoli stole his heart in European football. Only Maradona could have emulated that concept of carrying a team to the summit, as he had with Argentina, at Napoli.

The way he is revered there is felt to this day and will be for as long as the city stands.

In the clip of his warm-up before a Napoli game which has done as much as any of his matches to introduce the wonder of Maradona to the YouTube generation, accompanied by the 1980s song Live is Life, he literally dances with the ball.

He mixes his stretches with an exhibition of joyfully spontaneous ball mastery and nightclub grooves. It is as if he is serenading the ball. Seducing it even. The nonchalant trickery makes the crowd roar long before kick-off. The showman, the centrepiece of any match, the maker of miracles.

As they sang in the Curva B “Mamma, why does my heart beat so? Because I’ve seen Maradona, I’m in love”. For his disciples that love endures. Through giant murals, shrines, and now grief, from Buenos Aires to Naples, Maradona remains emblematic of their cities, their culture, their people, their struggles and dreams.

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“When you’re on the pitch, life goes away. Problems go away. Everything goes away” — Diego Maradona, 1960-2020

And then, when Diego Armando Maradona was back in the real world, the problems came flooding back. On the pitch, he would captivate audiences and mesmerise opponents with his brilliance. Off the pitch, chaos reigned.

“Every Sunday we played a match,” he said, recalling his time at Napoli, in Asif Kapadia’s stunning documentary Diego Maradona. “We went out to eat. Claudia (his wife at the time) would stay in with the girls and I went out to drink with my friends. And that’s when we took coke. And that carried on until Wednesday. And then I started cleansing, cleansing, cleansing to play on Sunday.”

Imagine that: the greatest footballer on the planet, quite possibly the greatest ever to play the game, going on three-day cocaine binges as a matter of routine, coming home so high that he would hide in the bathrooms so that his daughters could not see him in that state. And then spending the next three days sweating it out of his system so that he could perform his magic again on the Sunday afternoon before the cycle of destruction started up again.

It caught up with him in the end. Well of course it did. As Maradona said years later, “Drugs made me a worse player, not a better one. Do you have any idea the player I would have been if it weren’t for the drugs?”

And not just the cocaine, but the chaos that engulfed his life, whether in Barcelona, Naples, Seville or back home in Buenos Aires. If the modern football superstar lives an almost monastic existence, helped by an entourage that keeps distractions to a bare minimum (think Cristiano Ronaldo, think Lionel Messi), then Maradona was the opposite. In Naples in particular, he was surrounded by chaos. Ultimately, it overcame him.

Fernando Signorini, his personal fitness coach for many years, used to draw a distinction between “Diego”, the footballer and family man, and “Maradona”, the phenomenon whose fatal flaws came to be exposed at every turn as his career and life spiralled out of control.

We expect our sporting idols to be perfect, to be able to take everything in their stride, including the attention and the riches that change their lives in ways we cannot begin to comprehend. The gifts that Maradona was born with took him to heights which, arguably, no footballer had scaled before or since. Those gifts did not extend to an ability to cope with the ferocity of the attention and the adulation that came with the god-like status he attained in Naples and in Argentina.

The footage at the start of Kapadia’s documentary is astonishing. It begins with a car chase through the tunnels and streets of Naples and you think it is just generic footage, a little bit of creative licence to depict a sense of unruliness, until the convoy screeches to a halt inside the compound of the Stadio San Paolo and Maradona gets out. At the age of 23, with a $10.48 million price tag that shattered the world transfer record, he was being lauded as a godsend not just to the club but to a city that was one of the poorest in Europe.

Before being paraded to 70,000 success-starved supporters, Maradona was presented to the media in what looks like the most claustrophobic, frenetic press conference imaginable. The first question comes from a journalist asking Napoli’s saviour whether he knows what the Camorra is — “and if he knows that their money is everywhere here, even in football”. The club’s president, Corrado Ferlaino, intervenes, calling the question “highly offensive” and demanding the journalist in question is ejected before angrily telling the audience, “Naples works and it has a good work ethic. Criminals are a minority and there’s a serious police force ready to intervene in these matters.”

During his years in Naples, Maradona was strongly linked to the Camorra crime syndicate. He drank in their bars, gleefully accepting their gifts, their free champagne, their drugs, their sex workers and their willingness to hush things up so that poor Claudia, along with the rest of the world, remained oblivious to his many excesses.

On the pitch, Maradona was peerless in those years when he led Argentina to World Cup glory and Napoli — success-starved Napoli — to two Scudettos, a Coppa Italia and a UEFA Cup. Off it, his life was a mess. In January 1991, after a phone conversation with a sex worker was tapped by the police, Maradona was charged with cocaine possession and distribution. Three months after that, he was banned from football worldwide for 15 months after testing positive for banned substances. Further doping bans followed in 1994, after testing positive at the World Cup in the United States, and in 1997 as a most illustrious career meandered towards a sad denouement back in Argentina.

It wasn’t just the drink and the drugs. In 1998 he received a suspended prison sentence of two years and 10 months following an incident four years earlier in which he shot an air rifle at reporters, causing injury to four of them. It took him 29 years to recognise publicly a son born from an extra-marital affair in Naples. There were allegations of domestic abuse towards a girlfriend. As he said many times in his later life, “I made mistakes.”

This is what Signorini meant when he drew the distinction between “Diego” and “Maradona”. “For Diego, I would go to the end of the world,” he said. “But with Maradona, I wouldn’t take a step.”

Few sportsmen better encapsulate the phrase “flawed genius”. He was a flawed human being, but a bona fide genius with a ball at his feet. Without question, those flaws curtailed his career as well as, ultimately, his life.

The great unanswered question is whether fame, fortune and adulation changed Maradona or whether, conversely, he was undone by an outright refusal to change as the spotlight shone on him with ever greater intensity. In last year’s documentary, there were moments when he looked terrified, vulnerable and lost and moments when he looked so completely comfortable in his own skin, utterly convinced of his ability to play by his own rules and do whatever he pleased — both on the pitch and off it.

In the end, Maradona cracked, his flaws exposed for the world to see. But he did so having brought more unparalleled joy to the people of Naples and Argentina. There have been many great footballers — and Messi and Ronaldo, the greatest of this generation, can certainly claim to have scaled heights of excellence over a much longer period — but it is doubtful that any player has ever inspired such fervour as Maradona. In Naples and in Argentina, he crossed the line from sporting hero to cultural icon.

The sense of loss in Argentina is overwhelming. To the people of Buenos Aires in particular, he transcended his sport. Raised in the slums of Villa Fiorito, without electricity or running water, he called himself a “cabecita negra”, the phrase used witheringly by some of the upper classes to describe those of mixed Argentinian and Italian heritage. The literal translation is “little blackhead”. Maradona was proud of his roots. He became a talisman and a world-class figurehead for a country in turmoil. If Argentina’s 1978 World Cup success was seen in some quarters as a propaganda victory for the military junta that had seized control two years earlier, the Maradona-inspired triumph in Mexico in 1986 seemed to herald the emergence of a new Argentina.

Maradona was not just a great footballer. He was an artist, a warrior, a fierce patriot, a populist. He was a few less pleasant things besides, but, among those worshipped his talents, those flaws and rough edges only strengthened to his appeal and enhanced his legend. He was loved in spite of his demons. In some ways it felt as if he was loved all the more because of them.

And loved is the right word. In March, he returned to La Bombonera, the home of Boca Juniors, as coach of Gimnasia. His face was puffy, his expression confused and his movements as far as could be imagined from the combination of power and grace that once defined him, but, to those in the stands, whether young or old, this was like falling in love all over again. It was an outpouring.

It was a flashback to his previous farewell to La Bombonera for his benefit match in 2001, four years after a glorious career had been brought to an ignominious conclusion. He had made mistakes in his life, he said, but football had always been his salvation. “La pelota no se mancha,” he said — the ball does not show the dirt.

Or to put it another way, when Diego Maradona was on the pitch, life went away. Problems went away. Everything went away. And we just watched, enthralled.

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Diego Maradona, a life in pictures

https://theathletic.com/2221730/2020/11/25/diego-maradona-pictures/

At The Athletic, we are all about words. Sometimes though, it’s best to let pictures do the talking. So please take a few minutes to enjoy these beautiful photographs of the great Diego Maradona and share your memories below.

Maradona enjoying a cup of tea with his team-mates. He made his debut for Argentinos Juniors 10 days before his 16th birthday

A football is never too far from a young Maradona (centre), even while relaxing at the beach with his family

Never one to follow the norm, Maradona reads intently while laying at an angle on his bed. The less said about the pyjamas the better

During the maverick Argentine’s first World Cup in 1982, Belgium’s Ludo Coeck follows one of the few routes to stop Maradona — with a foul

As Maradona’s stature grows, he takes a trip down memory lane in 1983 by visiting the local ground where he first played in the outskirts of Buenos Aires

Maradona strikes the ball with a left foot that other players envied and fans marvelled during a friendly at Wembley

An English club fortunate enough to have Maradona don their jersey, Tottenham played Inter Milan in Osvaldo Ardiles’ testimonal. In a rare sight for many English fans, Maradona shows the crowd what they’re missing in front of 30,000 at White Hart Lane in May 1986

Eyes on the only thing that mattered

The “Hand of God” against England during the 1986 World Cup quarter-final is etched in football folklore. Here, Maradona leaps above Peter Shilton to score with his hand 

A nation’s hero, Maradona lifts the World Cup after guiding Argentina past West Germany in the final in Mexico

An image that captures his genius and vulnerability in the aftermath of that World Cup win. Everyone’s eyes were on him as he broke down with joy

Maradona breathes life into an entire city by winning the double at Napoli

Maradona and Claudia Villafane kiss for the cameras during their wedding at Luna Park Stadium on November 7, 1989 in Buenos Aires

Maradona is bereft after defeat in the 1990 World Cup final

Maradona cements his status as an Argentine hero after scoring the third goal in his country’s 4-0 triumph over Greece at the ’94 World Cup. The celebration was best remembered for him screaming down the TV cameras. He was later removed from the tournament after failing a drugs test

The gifted footballer once traded his boots for boxing gloves, taking part in an exhibition bout in Argentina in 1996

After retiring from football, Maradona entered a more troubled phase in his life and his health suffered. He struggled to escape his addictions, and here he smokes a cigar not long after being hospitalised on March 28, 2000

As concern grew over the beloved Argentine’s cocaine addiction, he took to a television programme in 2004 to confirm he would seek treatment

Yet Maradona returned to the national team, managing Argentina in 2010 in South Africa and here entertaining local children 

From one icon to another. Maradona offers some advice to his fellow countrymen and heir apparent Lionel Messi at the 2010 World Cup on how to follow in his footsteps. Argentina lost 4-0 to Germany in the quarter-finals

Although his managerial career never quite reached the heights of his playing days, Maradona remains a deity in the eyes of Argentines. Here, he salutes fans during a match in January 2020 of Gimnasia y Esgrima, the side he coached at the time of his death

[cosmicway 1,328]

The comparison between Pele and Maradona is based on who achieved most in his career.
This is not accurate because it depends on the teammates also.
Thus Pele won three world cups, but in the second he did not even play (in Chile 1962 he was injured in the second group stage match against Checoslovakia - it was Garincha, Vava and Amarildo who did the work after that). Maradona won one but if the Argentine squad of 1990 was a little better he could have won two.
Anyway Pele won three world cups and two intercontinental cups (with Santos 1962, 1963 - they defeated AC Milan and Benfica). The intercontinental final was a strong run affair those days - lost its significance in the mid seventies.
Diego won the Italian scudetto, UEFA cup (strong competition then - not like today's Europa) and the 1986 world cup. I don't care about the hand of God because fooling the referee is part of the day's work (and Tierry Henri also did it).
Pele never played for a European club. The South American teams were not giving their players so easily in the 60s. Inter Milan offered the record sum of 300,000 sterling - Santos were asking for 500,000 sterling.
Diego went to Barcelona first then to Napoli.
On paper Pele has more titles to his credit but Diego was better when seen as a unit after all. Difficult to distinguish.
 

Johann Cruyff is an also run and as for Messi he is Barca but his record in the national team is woeful.
 

 

[Johnnyeye 7,441]

10 hours ago, OhForAGreavsie said:

For many years the consensus opinion was that it was between Maradona and Pele as to who was the best footballer of all time. These days of course most fans give that honour to Messi but I'm still a holdout for Maradona being better than his fellow Argentine. I measure that on achievements.

The Argentina squad of 1986 was not a patch on their 1978 World Cup winning counterparts and the 1990 crew was nearer to being a bad side than it was to being a great one. Much nearer. Even so Maradona led the '86 group on a world cup winning campaign then dragged the 1990 collection back to the final. This was possibly the greatest achievement of Maradona's career. Argentina 1990 really were not good. Messi has had a much better supporting cast during his international career than Maradona enjoyed but he's achieved nothing.

Then there's Napoli. During their long history Naples has won just two Serie A titles. Both came when the side was led by Diego Maradona. Take Messi out of the great Barcelona team and replace him with Maradona and they still win everything in sight. Reverse the process and swap Maradona out for Messi in those Napoli and Argentina teams of the 80s/90s and what would you get? We'll never know but I do know what I think.

everything spot on mate, i couldn't have said it better myself, Maradona was simply on a different level above others, and like you mentioned we have to look at the supporting cast he had compared to Messi. It's not even up for debate

[killer1257 3,282]

For many years the consensus opinion was that it was between Maradona and Pele as to who was the best footballer of all time. These days of course most fans give that honour to Messi but I'm still a holdout for Maradona being better than his fellow Argentine. I measure that on achievements.
The Argentina squad of 1986 was not a patch on their 1978 World Cup winning counterparts and the 1990 crew was nearer to being a bad side than it was to being a great one. Much nearer. Even so Maradona led the '86 group on a world cup winning campaign then dragged the 1990 collection back to the final. This was possibly the greatest achievement of Maradona's career. Argentina 1990 really were not good. Messi has had a much better supporting cast during his international career than Maradona enjoyed but he's achieved nothing.
Then there's Napoli. During their long history Naples has won just two Serie A titles. Both came when the side was led by Diego Maradona. Take Messi out of the great Barcelona team and replace him with Maradona and they still win everything in sight. Reverse the process and swap Maradona out for Messi in those Napoli and Argentina teams of the 80s/90s and what would you get? We'll never know but I do know what I think.

I am not hating on Maradona. I love him much more than Messi or CR7, but Maradona is not better than those two I mentioned.
The comparison between Messi and Maradona regarding winning WC is unfair because many times you need luck to win WCs. Maradona beat England with two goals that should not have counted. First it was the hand of god and then Sergio Batista fouled glenn hoodle (ball was somewhere else) and then 5 seconds Maradona scored his most famous goal ever. You say that Argentine had a bad squad. That may be true, but how bad must have been England back then when they could not even score a goal against a bad Argentina? They must have been horrible, especially judging how they defended against Maradona and the fact they could not score against a bad Argentinian side.

You say that Messi had a better squad than Maradona. Even though England must have been far worse than Argentina back then because of the facts that I mentioned, let's say your point is true. Let's talk about Messi in the WC final 2014. Argentina had horrible players like Romero, Rojo, Garay and Martin fucking Demichelis as their best defender and GK in their starting line. This is some garbage. I never understood how they even got into the final with that squad . Ohh wait, maybe it was Messi? Messi's second best player in the team was prime Di maria and he was injured in that final. In my opinion, Argentina would have even won with prime Di Maria but we will never know. So Argentina played very defensively because of the horrible players they have and they missed their second best player in offense. Germany on the other hand, had a squad full of world class or near world class players. Apart from Kramer, höwedes and Klose, their starting line up was near WC or WC. Those players I just mentioned are not even that bad. Klose was still good and probably had a better game than Higuain. So, Germany's starting line up was much superior than Argentina, especially in defense. I consider it a wonder that Argentina survived that long. I am pretty sure that Messi would have won the title with Germany too, if he was German lol.
So now you might say, why did Messi not win 2010? Even if Argentina somehow managed to win with a horrible defense against Germany, would Argentina have beaten spain? Spain from 2008 to 2012 might be the best national team of all time. Messi would have won the title with them too.

You say, you judge players based on their achievements. Ronaldo Nazario in my opinion is the best striker ever. Did he win the CL? No. Did he win WC? Yes.
Ronaldo Nazario won the WC 2002 because Oliver Kahn bottled a match like he never bottled a game before. After the first goal conceded, Germany was nervous and Ballack was not playing because he was suspended.
So without Kahn's mistake and Ballack suspended, who knows what could have happened. Funny thing is that Brazil 2002 had insane luck against Turkey in semi finals. Turkey received two red cards and Brazil received a penalty. Rivaldo dived and someone got sent off and the one penalty was not a penalty because it was outside of the penalty box. Even if it was a foul, it was not in the penalty box. So basically Ronaldo had a lot of luck during WC and Messi did not. If Neuer was bottling like Oliver Kahn, Messi would have won the WC 2014 too lol.

Coming back to judging players based on achievements. Michael Ballack never won anything big in his life. In my opinion, he is at least top three German midfielders of all time. I think Matthäus was better, but Ballack I think is the second place. Ballack lost 2 CL finals and he lost 1 WC final.
2002 WC final he missed because he was suspended. He lost with Leverkusen against Real Madrid, in which Zidane scored a world class goal. Nothing wrong with losing to Madrid, who had a better squad. He lost against Manchester United in the CL final because John Terry was not good enough to score a penalty. Was it his fault that he never won a big trophy? Not in my opinion. Can he be considered maybe as the greatest German midfield player ever? In my opinion yes, even though I think it is someone else. Fucking Pogba won the world cup and he is nowhere near the level of Ballack. Prime Ballack would have won the with France 2018 or with Germany 2014. But he never had the luck just like Messi never had luck.
Coming back again to your point about judging players based on achievements.
In my opinion, Suarez is Ronaldo Nazario level. Maybe a little better, maybe a little worse. I think Suarez is a little bit worse than Ronaldo, but ok. Suarez played the best PL season a PL striker ever played. In 33 matches, he scored 31 goals and had 17 assists. He had Messi level stats in PL. Did he win the PL? No. Is there a case that he had the best PL striker season of all time? Yes. Is he maybe the best PL striker PL has ever seen? Judging based on his short time he was in PL, there will probably never be another Suarez. Did Suarez win the WC like Ronaldo did? No. He still is close to Ronaldo Nazario in my opinion. You will not win the WC with Uruguays squad.

By the way, you say that replacing Messi in a Barcelona team with Maradona would not change anything? Messi scored more than 50 goals for Barcelona in 2010. Maradona in his whole Napoli career scored 80 goals,while Maradona scored 20 goals with Barcelona and won only one cup. You do realise that Messi and Ronaldo are much better goal scorer than Maradona, regardless if he played in Serie A against Maldini, Baresi and Nesta. When Messi took the next step, he was the reason why Barcelona ended Real Madrids La Liga title run. Maradona was the best of his era, but Messi and CR7 are better than him. People forget how many goals and assist players like Messi and Ronaldo do and how much quality their goals are. I just watched Maradonas goaly for Napoli and they are all good, but Messi and Ronaldo have scored much better goals to be honest. And I love Maradona million times more than both messi and cr7. Maradona had his charisma that was something else.

Now, about the Pele vs Maradona debate. Maradona was much better. Maradona faced Maldini, Baresi and Nesta. Pele faced nobodys. Phil Jones would have been considered the goat defender back in Pele's time.






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