Diego Maradona: The God of Naples

By Carlo Garganese

Some couples are just meant to be together. None more so than Diego Armando Maradona and SSC Napoli. This was a relationship that had it all. Every possible emotion and feeling. There was unbridled joy and devotion. There was trust and hope. There were so many blissful highs yet also some distressing lows. But, above all else, there was unconditional love that – 35 years on from their first date together – has never wavered.

From day one, Diego immediately felt at home in Naples. He had grown up in extreme poverty in Villa Fiorito, an overpopulated shantytown in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. 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. Maradona’s bricklayer father Don Diego went to work at 4am each day and, in the words of his son, “arrived home dead”.

Maradona would always side with the poor and the oppressed throughout his life. 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. 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.

In Naples, he would find a team, city and public that endured the same problems as he did growing up. 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. “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.

The man who travelled to Barcelona to negotiate Maradona’s signing, Napoli sporting director Antonio Juliano, was from the slums of Naples himself. 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.

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. 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.  All together, they helped make up the difference and the deal was done.

Maradona was bowled over.

“I felt that they loved me, that they really and truly loved me,” he revealed in his autobiography, ‘Touched by God’. “Naples was a crazy city – they were as crazy as me – soccer was life itself. A lot of things reminded me of my origins. There had been hunger strikes and people had chained themselves to the fence at San Paolo stadium, begging me to come. How could I let them down?”

The hysteria of Diego’s presentation as a Napoli player on July 5, 1984 would only enhance this feeling. 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’).

Dressed 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. 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.

His first shot at the San Paolo was sumptuously curled into the top corner from 35 yards. With a Napoli scarf around his neck, he addressed his doting faithful. “Good evening, Neapolitans. I am very happy to be with you,” were his first words before he treated everyone to a keepie-uppie taster. He then booted the ball into the enraptured crowd and departed with a “Forza Napoli” (“Come on Napoli”).

Already, it felt like Maradona had become a living God – just as Juliano had predicted. His divine status would be consecrated by his heroics at the club over the next seven years.

NORTH VS SOUTH WAR

And this hatred for the north is what made Maradona’s achievement so special for Neapolitans.

Italy’s north and south have been at odds ever since the country was unified in 1871. The economic chasm between the two poles is astronomical. Italy’s industrial north – through factories such as FIAT in Turin – dominates the financial landscape. Meanwhile, the south is overwhelmingly agricultural and suffers from poverty and severe unemployment. Indeed, levels of unemployment recently surpassed 50 per cent in Naples.

This economic divide has resulted in many stereotypical and prejudicial attitudes. Southerners are looked down upon by northerners as poor, lazy, uneducated and unclean. They are branded ‘terroni’ – peasants – a most derogatory term. They are considered corrupt parasites of Arab and African descent whose neighbourhoods are controlled by the Mafia and Camorra. Meanwhile, northerners are seen by southerners as greedy, snobby and cold-hearted. They only care about making money – often by taking advantage of their southern subjects.

This animosity would be most explicitly represented on the football pitch and no citizens have suffered more territorial racism over the years than those from Naples. When Maradona’s team travelled to away matches up north they were greeted with deplorable abuse. ‘Welcome to Italy’, ‘Wash!’, ‘Napoli, cholera sufferers’ and ‘Vesuvius, wash them with fire’ were just a handful of the banners that would be displayed by northern fans. There would also be monkey chants due to the darker complexion of southern Italians.

“Everyone and everything was against us,” Maradona explained in his autobiography. “The worst was the ‘Welcome to Italy’ banners. That whole North v South battle made me stronger and gave me a chance to do what I like best: fight for a cause. And if it’s the cause of the poor, all the better.”

Juventus were the biggest representation of northern affluence and power. Bought in 1923 by the Agnelli family dynasty – who also owned FIAT – they were the team of the establishment. The most successful club in Italy – with over 20 Scudetti by the time of Maradona’s arrival – they boasted great political muscle and were, thus, consistently accused of receiving help from referees. No one hated Juve more than the Neapolitans, a group of people who were predisposed to challenging power and authority.

This dates as far back as the time of the Roman Empire with the legend of San Gennaro. The patron saint of Naples defied Rome during the Great Persecution of Christians, saving locals from certain death by hiding them. Whenever Neapolitans need a helping hand they pray to San Gennaro. The people of Naples also despised former dictator Benito Mussolini – and the city was the first in Italy to rebel against Nazi military occupation during the ‘Four Days of Naples’ in 1943.

Maradona, who was a close friend of Fidel Castro, embraced this anti-establishment vibe perfectly. In Kapadia’s film there is a scene where he is teaching his two-year-old daughter Dalma anti-Juve songs. “Juve, Juve, vaffanculo! (Juve, Juve, f*ck off!)” Dalma repeats after her father.

“For the powerful North, what we did with Napoli was a real blow,” El Pibe explained. “It hurt. No one from the south ever won the Scudetto before us. And they didn’t just love me in Naples; all of poor southern Italy loved me. I was their emblem. The emblem against the powerful North, the one who took from the rich to give to the poor South.”

DIEGO’S DARK SIDE

Professionalism was something Maradona himself never knew the meaning of. His love for parties, nightclubs and women, in particular, was legendary.

In Naples, he had a very colourful and controversial love life – despite living with his long-term and long-suffering girlfriend Claudia Villafane, whom he had started dating when he was 16 and she 15. His former driver, Pietro Pugliese, claimed that Diego slept with over 8,000 women while in Italy. These allegedly included television personalities such as the American-Italian singer and showgirl Heather Parisi. “I was in love with Claudia but I was no saint. And there were some beautiful women. Oh, so many!” confessed Diego.

In September 1986, a 22-year-old accountant, Cristina Sinagra, went public on the day she had given birth to her son to reveal that Maradona was the father; the result of a four-month affair. A bitter paternity suit followed as Diego Sr refused to acknowledge the boy named Diego Armando Jr. A court ruling in 1993 eventually confirmed Maradona Sr was the biological father but it took the best part of two decades before the Napoli icon truly accepted his son. “He was just a mistake,” Diego Sr often coldly sniped.

The Sinagra affair caused a great stress on his relationship with Claudia. “I turn on the television and see a woman holding a baby and she says it’s Diego’s,” Claudia recalled. “He came home crying saying it was a lie. Girls would claim to have flings with him and he would tell me not to believe them. I was very docile so I believed him.”

Although they had their break-ups, they did eventually marry in 1989 after having two daughters together – Dalma and Gianinna. The marriage itself was a lavish affair, costing a reported £1 million. Over 1000 guests attended, with Maradona flying in 200 of his Napoli team-mates and their families on a Boeing 747. The venue featured a 40-foot waterfall, while the couple arrived at the reception in a 1937 Dodge convertible. In true Maradona fashion, the party lasted until 8am the following morning. 

As a result of his extra-curricular activities, Maradona’s record of attendance at training was pitiful. He regularly missed or turned up late for sessions and would return from holidays or trips abroad days after schedule – usually in poor physical shape. Sometimes he missed matches as well. At the start of the 1989 season, he refused to play the first month of the campaign after a disagreement over a proposed transfer to Marseille. He eventually returned to lead Napoli to their second Scudetto.

The most infamous instance of him going AWOL was before a decisive European Cup last 16 match against Spartak Moscow in November 1990. Following a sex and drug-fuelled night out, Maradona refused to travel to Moscow with the rest of his team-mates. When he finally sobered up, he hired a private jet to take him to the Russian capital the night before the game. He finally joined up with his team-mates – but not before the socialist-sympathising Maradona had been given a private tour of Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square.

For once, Diego was punished by Napoli for his misbehaviour. He started from the bench but despite coming on as a second-half substitute he could not prevent Napoli from losing in a penalty-shootout. At the age of 30 and with his best days behind him, Napoli seemed no longer willing to indulge his excesses any more. Neither were the media.

Indeed, it had been an open secret since Maradona had arrived six years earlier that he had a serious cocaine addiction. He had first started taking the drug while at Barcelona in 1982 and this continued prolifically throughout his time at San Paolo. “One touch and I felt like superman. In Naples, drugs were everywhere. And I took more and more there,” he revealed. John Ludden, in the brilliant book ‘Once Upon a Time in Naples’ upon which Kapadia’s film is based, reveals that Maradona’s addiction was so serious that he even snorted a line of coke in Pope John Paul II’s own bathroom during a much-publicised private audience with his Holiness in Rome in 1985.

There were also constant suspicions about Maradona’s links with the Camorra, the mafia-type crime syndicate that possessed a stranglehold grip on the city. At the press unveiling of Maradona, a brave French journalist, Alain Chaillou, openly asked the Argentine if he knew that the Camorra had helped fund his world-record fee from Barcelona. A furious Ferlaino called for the journalist to be thrown out of the press room immediately. Amidst collective shouts of “Fuori, Fuori” (“Get out, get out”), two Napoli security guards man-handled Chaillou off the premises and onto the first plane back home.

Questions would be asked again – this time more discreetly – when Napoli sensationally collapsed at the end of the 1987-88 season. The Azzurri seemed almost certain to retain the Scudetto but only picked up one point in their last four matches to allow Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan to lift the title. Rumours swirled that the Camorra and illegal betting rings were involved in Napoli’s inexplicable disintegration.

Maradona’s friendship with the Giuliano family, who were one of the most powerful Camorrista clans in Naples, led to a police investigation. The inquiry unveiled 71 photos of Maradona snapped with the Giulianos. These included him in a jacuzzi at their private residence in Forcella and at the wedding of the cousin of Luigi Giuliano, the Don of the family. When questioned in court, Maradona said that he had spent time with the Giuliano family after being invited to their home by a fan but denied all knowledge of knowing about their underworld connections. He would years later confess he was well aware who they were. “They were like something out of The Untouchables movie about Al Capone. ‘Any problem you have is my problem’, they would say. They said they would protect us. It was like something from the movies.”