48/48 🇦🇷 Argentina.
D10S.
In Spanish, God is Dios. Diez means 10. Put them together and you get a name for eternity.
Everyone knows what Diego Armando Maradona achieved on the pitch.
This is about what he meant to the people.
What truly makes him the greatest of all time.
He was born in Villa Fiorito, one of Buenos Aires' poorest slums. No running water. His first football was a sock stuffed with rags. His father was a bricklayer who left for work at 4am and "arrived home dead."
His neighbours called him Pelusa, the Fuzz, because of his wild hair as a boy. The name stuck in Villa Fiorito long after the rest of the world knew him as El Pibe de Oro.
"I want to be the idol of the poor kids of Naples because they are just like me as a youngster in Villa Fiorito."
He never forgot where he came from. And the world's poor never forgot him for it.
Argentina in 1986 was a country still open and bleeding. The military dictatorship had disappeared 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983. The Falklands War had humiliated the nation two years before the World Cup. Hyperinflation was destroying what remained. A country stripped of its dignity, its identity, its faith in itself.
Then one man from a slum in Buenos Aires picked up a football and gave it all back. He didn't just win the 1986 World Cup. He carried a broken nation on his back. "He was our revenge against everything that had been done to us."
Then Naples. Italy in the 1980s was divided between the rich industrial north and the poor, humiliated south. When Napoli came to visit the northern clubs, banners hung in the stands: "Welcome to Italy." The message was clear, Naples was not really part of the country.
When Diego arrived in 1984, Barcelona tried to squeeze extra money from the deal at the last minute. The Neapolitans responded by making collections in the streets, from the packed tenements of the Spanish Quarter to the Camorra-run district of Forcella. Poor people giving what little they had to bring one man to their city.
He saw what they had done. He understood immediately. "I am one of you."
He won them the Serie A title in 1987. Their first ever. And again in 1990. Two scudettos the north had never thought possible from a city they had never taken seriously.
Neapolitans didn't celebrate. They wept. Because it was about more than football.
The 1990 World Cup semi-final was played in Naples. Italy vs Argentina. The Italian media demanded Neapolitan loyalty to the national team.
Maradona spoke first. "Naples has always been mistreated by Italy. Why should you support Italy now?" He divided Italy to the bone. Half the crowd cheered for Argentina. Italy never forgave him. Naples never stopped loving him.
When he returned to Naples in 2005 for a gala match, grown men cried in the stands.
It all happened in the stadium that carries is name since the day he died.
November 25, 2020. Aged 60.
Argentina declared three days of national mourning. His body lay in state at the Casa Rosada, the Presidential Palace, the same building from which Eva Perón had once addressed the nation.
Hundreds of thousands queued through the night to say goodbye. In Naples, people painted new murals before the sun came up. In Ghana, in India, in Palestine, people who had never met him wept.
Then 2022. The first World Cup after his death. Argentina won.
Some things cannot be explained by football.
Then 2023. Napoli won the Scudetto for the first time in 33 years, their third ever title.
In the Spanish Quarter, under the mural on Via Emanuele de Deo, people left flowers and candles and wept again.
He was watching. He is always watching.
El Pibe de Oro. El Pelusa. D10S.
Today his murals cover the cities of Naples and Buenos Aires.
In Naples: the Spanish Quarters, which has become a pilgrimage site for tourists and football supporters from around the world. San Giovanni a Teduccio, Rione Sanità and his old training ground Campo Paradiso in the Soccavo area. You cannot walk through a single neighbourhood without seeing his face.
In Buenos Aires: La Boca, where a giant mural faces La Bombonera. La Paternal, where Argentinos Juniors gave him his first professional contract. A 45-metre portrait covers an entire building on Avenida San Juan in Constitución. The giant mural in Canning was created to be seen from planes that take off or arrive at the Ezeiza International Airport. The entire city is an open-air museum.
The greatest footballer who ever lived. A boy from a slum who gave the poor of two continents something no politician, no government, no institution ever gave them.
Dignity. Pride. The unshakeable belief that someone from nothing could conquer everything.
D10S. 🇦🇷
In the coming weeks, we will dive into his greatest World Cup moments on the pitch. So stay tuned.
The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.
The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.
Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.
If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.