Even in death, controversy refuses to stay clear of Diego Armando Maradona, arguably the greatest footballer the world has known, who died in disputed circumstances on November 25, 2020, at the age of 60. Ever since, doctors in Argentina have been divided over whether he could have been saved had those attending him shown better professional judgement. Buenos Aires, along with the rest of the world, is shaken every now and then by accusations of negligent treatment, routinely followed by denials. The one and only Maradona, buffeted by storm after storm in his extraordinarily colourful and chequered lifetime, appears destined not to enjoy the luxury of posthumous peace.

With the 2026 FIFA World Cup opening in the US on June 11, what better way to remember the man than to revisit Maradona by Kusturica—a distinguished experimental documentary by the Bosnia-born Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, whose admiration for the football icon bordered on adulation. Exploiting to the full the remarkable visual and verbal possibilities on offer, Kusturica fashioned a riveting portrait of an individual who was, by turns, a memorable sportsman, a loving but ill-starred family man, and a man of political principle whose convictions were rooted in a working-class childhood racked by deprivation. The result: at least three-quarters of the world still love and honour him as one of their own.

“God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.”

– Charles Baudelaire

Kusturica opens his ninety-minute documentary with these words. Structured like a musical, the film does more—in its accumulation of image and testimony—than a hundred newspaper articles could, to illuminate the tempestuous, tragic, and triumphant life and career of the man whom the football writer Luca Caioli called “the greatest footballer of all time, who could destroy any opposition all by himself”.

Mixing interviews, home-movie clips, excerpts from feature films, animations, and archival footage with the touch of an inspired director, Kusturica proves why, in his heyday, he ranked among the finest filmmakers in the world. The film is one master’s heartfelt tribute to another—one working with a camera and his own rock band, the other kicking the life out of his opponents for as long as he toyed with a piece of inflatable leather, and long after.

Luca Caioli reported on football for newspapers, radio, and television across Europe for many years. His bibliography includes biographies of Lionel Messi and Neymar Jr. In justification of his assessment of Maradona as the greatest footballer of all time, Caioli has said: “Maradona would single-handedly change the course of a game with his supreme skill and talent. Yes, there were the legendary Pelé and Johan Cruyff before him, but Maradona was truly a class apart in terms of destroying the opposition. Don’t forget that he played for a relatively lesser-known team like Napoli and was able to lift it to great heights—that is greatness.”

Speaking years after his retirement, Jorge Valdano, who played for Argentina alongside Maradona, reminisced that players like Garrincha, Pelé, and Maradona had the ability to cut themselves off from their surroundings and concentrate solely on the game; in a sense, they were returning to their childhood. While the others were great footballers—and at least one of them, Garrincha, a great human being as well—it was Maradona who represented a complete universe: the attainment through struggle of the highest summits; a flawed destiny outside the playing field; and a prolonged reckoning with a serious drug habit which he was, mercifully, able to overcome.

Kusturica’s documentary takes on a moving confessional edge as Maradona admits to having been an “asshole” and to missing the beautiful years when his daughters, Dalma and Giannina, were growing up because he was then either in police custody or in rehabilitation.

Maradona is heard consoling himself thus: “If Jesus stumbled, why shouldn’t I?” He quickly adds: “I made a mistake, I paid for it.” And then he shows his love for the game and for all those who love it: “If someone makes a mistake, football should not pay for it.”

Kusturica would be the first to agree with Valdano when he says: “Diego made mistakes off the pitch, but he must be judged by his achievements on it. Maradona is the embodiment of the Argentinian dream. He played like a mischievous boy and tried to make fools of everyone. With the ball at his feet, he was a magician. Every Argentinian would like to play like Maradona. Even the celebrated Alfredo di Stefàno, who was a top footballer himself.”

The Messiah

What was it about Maradona that, so many years after he stopped playing, he still excited the popular imagination as no other sportsman on earth? Wherever the short, sturdily built, muscular man with the baby face, the winsome smile, and tattoos of Fidel and Che on thigh and arm went, he would take a swift look around the place and its people—and leave it having conquered it. Veni, Vidi, Vici! The Argentine Caesar of international football did that in Kolkata in 2008, and did it again in Kerala in 2012. They say there are remote corners of this planet where people have not heard of Christ but start dancing at the mention of Maradona. It could be a story cooked up by an excessively proud and imaginative Argentine, but the point is made.

Kusturica shows us, in mock-serious fashion, the existence in Argentina of a church—complete with footballesque rituals and ceremonies—dedicated to Maradona, whose congregation is prepared to lay down its lives for him. The tongue-in-cheek sacred message seems to run thus: if God cannot be brought down from heaven, he will have to be invented on terra firma. The director of such modern classics as Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (Silver Lion for Best First Work, Venice Film Festival, 1981) and When Father Was Away on Business (Palme d’Or, Cannes, 1985) devotes considerable footage to the church congregation singing praises to the icon who rose from the humblest beginnings to heights frequented by monarchs and heads of state—for most of whom, however, he had the scantest regard.

Maradona was born to a proud member of the labouring class and his patient wife, who laboured no less on the home front; he was one among many brothers and sisters. His parents, however hard they struggled, had difficulty putting enough food on the table for their growing children. Visiting the humble home where he grew up dreaming of playing in the World Cup and winning it for Argentina, Maradona is shown remembering the time when his mother would feign sudden attacks of stomach pain and leave the dining table without eating. Years later, he realised she had done it so that he and his siblings could have a little more—her share.

Living in the suffocating lower depths of the big, cruel city and struggling to give shape to his ambition, Maradona fashioned at an early age his own politics of the “aristocracy of the poor”. Boca Juniors offered him less money than other wealthier teams, but he chose Boca because he was more interested in things other than money; he also wanted to keep his promise to his father that he would play for Boca. He had promised his father too that he would play in the World Cup and bring the trophy to Argentina. This, Kusturica says, is what separates Maradona from the rest: this disinterest in the symbols of worldly success.

The rebel

In later years, Maradona gave further proof of the rare, regal stuff he was made of. By his own account, the US wanted to give him an award but he declined—not only because he thought George W. Bush was a “war criminal”, but because the Cubans had decided, around the same time, to decorate him with a national honour. Kusturica speculates that had Maradona not been a footballer, he would have been a swashbuckling revolutionary, smelling of gunpowder and the Mexican Revolution and of a bordello out of which he had just stepped. In a no-holds-barred narration laced with irony and laden with telling comments, the Serbian director makes the audience ripple with delight when he is not busy causing roars of laughter. There is ribaldry in the narration, also a sense of pure and innocent fun, and, finally, great sadness at the spectacle of a great soul defeated—but only temporarily—by his “doing everything to his own detriment”.

There are those who believe that sports and politics do not mix. But ground realities tell a different story. All his adult life, Maradona consciously and deliberately committed act after act of symbolic sabotage to prove that sports is, in fact, little sport and much politics. He flatly refused to shake hands with Prince Charles of England because he thought those hands were stained with the blood of Argentine victims summarily executed by the British army in the aftermath of the Malvinas (Falklands) war of 1982. The contempt extended to Margaret Thatcher, then British Prime Minister, and to the Queen of England.

This friend of Castro, Chávez, Evo Morales, and the poorest of the poor of Argentina and the rest of Latin America did what he did because that was all he could do to avenge the brutalities perpetrated by England and her protector, the US. “We were representing our dead in the Malvinas war, so we had to defeat on the playing field one of the rulers of the world,” Maradona tells Kusturica, who uses hilarious animation sequences in his film showing the footballer settling scores with the likes of Reagan, Bush, Blair, Thatcher, the Queen, and her son.

Maradona’s unqualified admiration for Fidel Castro was another compelling facet of the enormous folklore that steadily grew around him. Referring to a 1987 meeting with the Cuban President, he tells Kusturica: “Fidel looked like a beast defending his territory against the US… he has b****… I can die for Fidel… reading Che and staying in Cuba were major influences for me… having the most powerful bomb doesn’t make you powerful.”

Meanwhile, Maradona’s aversion to active participation in formal politics stemmed from his belief that ‘politicians rob the people’; these people’s enemies are almost always hand-in-glove with mafia elements. The mafiosi whose activities he knew best, however, belonged to FIFA, the immeasurably rich and powerful organisation controlling world football. Maradona told Kusturica: “Let us talk about the twenty years when Havelange [João Havelange of Brazil] was the head of FIFA. He used his immense power in a way where we can say that if Havelange was the mafia arms dealer, Blatter sold the bullets.”

Forever relevant

If Kusturica’s observation that Maradona was “his own worst enemy” in the days he was hooked on cocaine is true, it is equally true that he was his best redeemer as well. Big tears roll down his corpulent cheeks as he narrates his suffering during his desperate attempt to distance himself from his drug habit. Only after he had given it up and redeemed himself—above all in his own eyes—was he able to approach his daughters again with open arms. This chapter in Maradona’s epic struggle to rise above himself brings to mind Shaw’s observation: “A life spent committing mistakes is more honourable and useful than one spent doing nothing.”

Maradona’s fall from Olympian heights mattered far less than his rebirth from the ashes that threatened to claim him for good. That recovery required the kind of character, vision, and humanity that exist more in myths and legends than in real life. If stamina, speed, and skill are the indispensable prerequisites for a footballer to succeed on the playing field, one requires at least two other virtues to be a statesman outside that green patch: a deep sense of honour and the humility to say, “I am sorry”, to all those millions whose expectations had been laid low by a single act of indiscretion. Maradona, recovered and repentant, showed why he was not just a great footballer.

At a time when the whole world—but Latin America more than any other part of it—appears to be up for grabs in the Trump era, the absence of someone like Maradona, whose charm mixed with defiance commanded extraordinary international respect, is acutely felt. Trump, for all his bluster, would hopefully have been reduced to a failed bully had he tried to do to Maradona what he has done to Maduro. Hypothetically speaking, it would have been an apocalyptic test of whether football is, as it is often held to be, the most widely followed religion on earth.

Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society, and politics.

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