I watched this game live in 1986... the atmosphere that day, in that heat and altitude they had to play in, even on the little 14" TV we had in our house was palpable. There was something about the quality of the colors, the weather, the camera work, even to this day you can distinguish the video from the '86 World Cup at a glance of just a couple of seconds. It still brings back such amazing memories from my childhood - even though we lost. I collected the Panini World Cup stickers religiously and put them all carefully in the sticker album. I was heartbroken to be knocked out by someone I considered to be a massive cheat, but even so, I can't take away from the brilliance of this goal. It was an incredible run. He deserved the goal. I wish I could've said they deserved the game without feeling that tinge of bitterness.
The heat? I live in Mexico City, it's basically never hot here. That game was on June 22, and according to WolframAlpha that day had a high of 15C. I don't know if that data is accurate, but I can tell you a high of 15C in June is plausible. Even if Wolfram's data is sketchy, I'd bet the high temperature on that day was somewhere between 15C and 25C.
That depends on what you mean by hot: the highest temperature ever recorded in Mexico City is 38C, so my friends from northern Mexico and from, say, Arizona would say that no, Mexico City does not have even a day or two when it gets hot. (Of course, 38C is probably much too hot for comfort if you are playing football.)
But back to June 22, 1986.
I'm pretty sure the Mexican national weather service knows exactly how hot it was on June 22, 1986 in Mexico City, but unfortunately their website doesn't seem to have day-by-day data available for download (at least not that far back). I did find a table of monthly average high temperatures [1], and for June 1986 in Mexico City (see "Distrito Federal" in the table) the average high temperature was 23.6C. The Weather Underground says that on June 22, 1986 the highest temperature was 75F [2], which is 23.9C. (Why doesn't the Weather Underground default to Celsius for visitors from Mexico?)
So it looks like I would have won my (very conservative) bet that the temperature was somewhere between 15C and 25C that day.
> Maybe the TV commentator said it was a hot day.
This is definitely possible!
1. The commentator could have assumed that because the game was in Mexico it would be hot! This happens all the time. I have explained to dozens of people that Mexico City doesn't really get hot, most are surprised. Of course, when I remind them Mexico City is at an altitude of 2.2km they usually believe me about the lack of heat.
2. The commentator could have known it was 25C and still thought that was hot for a football match.
I'm watching the game right now on BBC Sport, the one with English commentators (Emlyn Hughes, Terry Venables etc). All the fans are wearing short sleeve t-shirt, this indicates that the temperature is between 20C-24C. Mexicans are very sensitive to cold, so most of them wear jumpers when it's below 20C.
That's interesting, looks like it was hotter in the UK at that time. With temps as high as 31c. I bet if you asked most people from the UK what the weather is like in Mexico they would probably assume it's unbearably hot.
What's your definition of "being a cheat" in football? Let me remind you that kicking Maradona during a match, trying to break his legs so he can no longer play, is cheating. Punching, pushing, hurting someone on purpose is cheating. Even one of the BBC commentators, Emlyn Hughes, said during the England vs Argentina match: "Oh, that was awful. He deserves a red car. Oh well, looks like we got away with it".
And yes, scoring a goal with your hand is also cheating. Did Maradona scored a goal with his hand? Yes. Did the English team kick and hurt Maradona the entire match. Yes, I saw it with my own eyes.
This is why FIFA invented the concept of Fair Play, to stop players from kicking and hurting others. And why they invented the VAR, to stop them from scoring goals with their hand.
For me, Emlyn Hughes International Soccer is the best football game from the 80s. Was released 2 years after Maradona scored the Goal of the Century against England. I remember that Emlyn Hughes was one of the commentators.
I recall watching it at my granny and grandad's house down in Devon. One of the dogs pissed on the TV aerial, which was run up a rubber plant. The colours went a bit odd after that and there was a bit more static on the screen. The game was electric.
Maradona's contribution for the Argies was absolutely awesome. He had style, class, aggression, a massive swagger and an incredible situation awareness. There were another 22 people on the pitch that day but:
This goal was incredible, but with many years passed, it has faded in significance for me. Not sure why, if it is because the game has evolved, or I have seen many other great goals, or something else. But probably because I think the defense was too passive. This goal would not be done today, most probably.
It's more than the play itself. It's the context. A world cup game (on of the best in recent decades at that), an Argentina x England after a war which precipitated massive change in Argentina, the whole atmosphere around that match. Then the hand of god, then that goal. It will be a legend remembered for centuries to come, in the memory and folklore of Argentinians especially, and of football lovers everywhere.
Scoring against Getafe is not comparable to scoring against England in a world cup, specially when it is Argentina against England (in a game England invented) only a few years against the Falklands war. It's a great goal by Messi, but Maradona's goal has a place in history books.
> Records trace the history of soccer back more than 2,000 years ago to ancient China. Greece, Rome, and parts of Central America also claim to have started the sport; but it was England that transitioned soccer, or what the British and many other people around the world call “football,” into the game we know today.
In short: everyone lays claim to kicking around a ball, but England invented the modern game
When people talk about "the modern game", I think most would agree we're talking about passing to players running into a better position further up the pitch
The first rules established in England allowed no such thing. Forward passes were still not permitted (like Rugby). It was in Scotland where the offside rule that loosely resembles what it is today was actually invented, allowing players to spread themselves a bit more around the pitch.
My understanding is that kicking something about with the aim of getting it somewhere or other existed in lots of different places, independently. The modern, codified game more or less resembling what we have today was invented in England.
Amazingly similar. I think it is better. Notice how the player that chases him does not slow the pace, but pushes on until he makes a failed attempt to break the play. Speed seems faster too. A good illustration of evolution of the game. Of course, we don't know if Maradona would still have scored with more effort from the English defense, maybe he would. In any case, two great goals.
I dont know if you have played football or are a fan, but the context is a great part of the difficulty of a goal, not only were his opponents better the stakes were sky-high. Players who regularly score in a normal game freeze when the do-or-die time comes. For all his brilliance Messi has never scored a goal in a decisive game in a WC, Maradona scored 4 in 2 games in 1986.
And there was that moment Messi skied a penalty kick in ... what was it, the Copa América final? He announced his retirement the day after. Of course, retracted.
I was in a random bar in Barcelona when Ronaldo scored a hat trick to come back against Wolfsburg in the CL. For a Madrid fan, it was amazingly juicy. A little old lady started dancing the flamenco to taunt a table of young lads.
True, but remember that in the 80s the rules were different and players did not hesitate to tackle opponents. Also Maradona had to be more careful against England in a World Cup match than Messi playing against Getafe.
A few years afterwards, the game began speeding up. The goal is from an earlier era. Before the backpassing was outlawed. Before tactical fouls earned a yellow card. Before hacking fell out of the game. One of the remarkable features of the goal is that he avoided being pulled/pushed/kicked down by any of the defenders.
Another remarkable feature is that it happened at 2200m, in July, with 1986 air quality. Futbol in Mexico still looks different because so much of it is played at altitude...and so much of European futbol is played near sea level.
Hopefully, its most remarkable feature will never be surpassed: massive geopolitical significance in the wake of the war in the south Atlantic.
> One of the remarkable features of the goal is that he avoided being pulled/pushed/kicked down by any of the defenders
100%! The 80s was an era of defensive brutality, when horrendos tackles from behind were allowed. Tricky dribblers like Maradona were routinely hacked down. Even Emlyn Hughes said during the England vs Argentina match: "Oh, that was awful tackle by Terry Fenwick. He deserves a red car. Oh well, looks like he got away with it".
The fact it was during an eliminatory game of World Cup (that Argentina ended up winning) matters a lot to the importance and beauty of this goal. There are not many opportunities in a player life to do such a thing (unlike national league or even continental league matches)
That is certainly true. But there is a World cup every four years and in most cups in the past, let's say, 20 years, there is an eliminatory game with an equally great or greater goal. I think this goal has become legendary because of:
- Maradona's dominance as a player throughout the -86 cup
- The Falkland Islands war just a few years prior giving this game a special tension and attention
- It's beauty relative other goals at the time
My comment is just a reflection to often heard comments about it being the greatest goal ever. Judging it just by what the clip shows, it has faded for me. But the historical context is important.
The defense is not passive but the football field was very soft and it's hard to run around to play football on it. This is according to Gary Lineker, England forward who was playing in the tournament. The bad condition favours Maradona who's accustomed to play in bad field condition.
If you ran for a few meters and tried to control a ball at your feet, you'd understand somewhat. Even that is extremely difficult to do well- shifting the ball and keeping it under control of your feet and away from defenders.
Now try to imagine people trying to hack you down (totally normal defending back then) and tugging your shirt, in the blazing heat, at altitude, against a team that humiliated your country in a war a few years earlier...and instead you waltz around all of them, make them look amateurish, and knock them out of the biggest sports tournament on the planet at a sport they invented.
Nicely put me old fruit. Sadly we have managed to make a habit of that. For example the "death of English cricket" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/23241494 is why the Ashes exist.
Soccer is not grid iron, nor is it rugby but back in the day, defence could be quite a bit more robust than it is now. Footie players are not built like the second row and if you happen to apply six studs (cleats I think for the left pondians) at speed to the side of someone's knee then it will not end well.
If you look carefully, you will notice that Maradona doesn't simply whizz around defenders: he completely humiliates our boys by finding space and making the ball go there with him. The bloody thing is attached to his toe when he needs it to be so and then he simply flicks it into the net, almost as an afterthought. He barely looks at it - he know where it is because he has told it to be there.
So the importance of this goal was that Maradona dribbled pas almost the whole England team single highhandedly and humiliated them, restoring the pride of a nation (Argentina) who lost a war (Falklands War) before this to England.
Argentina did not loose the war, that's what Brits don't understand, a facist dictator lost the war. You see, in 1982 my family and the entire country was at war with an Argentinean dictator, when suddenly Margaret Tatcher, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, saw the opportunity and instead of de-escalating the tension between UK and the dictator, she decided to go to war with him. What the media didn't tell the Brits is that Argentina was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, Argentine people felt betrayed by England. Both countries were close friends for more than 100 years, since 1810 when Britain and Argentina signed a treaty of friendship proposed by Woodbine Parish. His cousin, John P. Robertson, was a good friend of General San Martin. Argentina and England had 2 enemies in common: Spain and France. Both countries were allies until the beginning of world war 2, when General Perón became a good friend of Mussolini. The dictators and facists Videla a Galtieri went to war with the UK, US and NATO. There was no democracy in Argentina, no government and diplomats to stop the war. It was an illegal war because it was not approved by the Congress and Senate. The fact that Maradona scored an "illegal" goal against the Brits was seen as a revenge for loosing a war that no one wanted to fight, except for Tatcher.
I was alive at the time, in the UK (not England). Everyone knew the war was not with the Argentinian people. Also Maradona became a hero in our house for defeating England[1].
It was a bit late to de-escalate after the islands had been invaded. Do you really think Galtieri would have gone for any kind of political settlement that would have seen troops withdrawn or islands returned? The whole thing was his Hail Mary exercise to stay in power. I seem to recall US SoS Haig tried pretty hard to fix things.
The big mistakes by the Brits were made beforehand by not taking seriously the noises being made by the junta, when there might have been a chance to contain things.
It’s very sad that what was once a strong relationship between the two nations went downhill with Peron and since then the islands / evil Brits theme gets rolled out to distract from internal issues.
The Argentine people have certainly suffered appallingly under dictators and poor leadership.
And yes, without the sentiment that followed winning back the islands Thatcher and her then future would probably have played out very differently, but don’t doubt that there was very strong support in the UK at large for the recovery of the islands.
> It was a bit late to de-escalate after the islands had been invaded.
According to my family, a bunch of people, probably fisherman or metallurgic workers, raised a flag in one of the island (we don't know why) and then Galtieri sent some troops to protect these people. When the fascists arrived to the islands, they were hostile to the residents. And then hell broke loose, and Galtieri was at war with the UK, US and NATO. A complete lunatic. Once the war started, the propaganda machinery took over. People fighting the dictator didn't want this war, but knew very well it would weaken the Military junta.
> Do you really think Galtieri would have gone for any kind of political settlement
No. The ERP (People's Revolutionary Army) and Montoneros were fighting against Galtieri, in the streets of Buenos Aires, so the Military Junta needed a distraction. However, my mom always said that the only person who could stop that war was Lady Di. She was very popular in Argentina, people used to compare her with Evita. Maybe my mom was wrong, she was a bit of dreamer after all.
> The big mistakes by the Brits were made beforehand by not taking seriously the noises being made by the junta
True. Galtieri never thought England would go to war. I'm not sure why, probably because he had bad intel, or was a complete sociopath.
> It’s very sad that what was once a strong relationship between the two nations went downhill with Peron
Yes, it's sad. After Peron everything went downhill. My mom is an English teacher, and was born in Argentina. She loves the English culture and people (Ladi Di, Churchill, etc), and the war did not change any of that, but deep inside I think she feels betrayed by England (by Tatcher, the media, and even the Queen). But she knows very well what happened and why, and finds comfort in thinking that the war helped restore democracy in her country. She was a proud Montonera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montoneras
> Although the ERP continued for a while under the leadership of Enrique Gorriarán Merlo, by late 1977 the guerrilla threat had been eradicted or gone underground.
> The Montoneros were effectively finished off by 1977, although their "Special Forces" did fight on until 1981. The Montoneros tried to disrupt the World Cup Football Tournament being hosted in Argentina in 1978 by launching a number of bomb attacks. In late 1979, the Montoneros launched a "strategic counteroffensive" in Argentina, and the security forces killed more than one hundred of the exiled Montoneros, who had been sent back to Argentina after receiving special forces training in camps in the Middle East.
It was a civil war between a facist dictator and the Argentines who wanted freedom and democracy. Of course Montoneros went underground, they were being killed by the thousands. The good news is that the wounds left by fascism are now healing.
In Argentina, Maradona was seen as Evita and Che Guevara. The Champion of the poor, and the face of anti-imperialism.
> The fact that Maradona scored an "illegal" goal against the Brits was seen as a revenge for loosing a war that no one wanted to fight, except for Tatcher.
I'm pretty sure Leopoldo Galtieri wanted the war more than Thatcher did; he started it, after all.
Also, negotiating with dictators doesn't always end well. Look at what happened in 1939.
> I'm pretty sure Leopoldo Galtieri wanted the war
100%. The ERP (People's Revolutionary Army) and Montoneros were fighting in the streets of Buenos Aires, so Galtieri and the Military Junta needed a distraction. A big one.
> he started it, after all
This is probably a myth created by the media. A bunch of people, probably fisherman or metallurgic workers raised a flag, and hell broke loose. Things escalated very quickly after that. All we know is that a small group of people raised a flag in one of the island and then Galtieri was at war with the UK, US and NATO. The Military junta killing Argentine people, and going to war with a powerful country, a country that defeated the German Empire. It's crazy! Was the war inevitable? I don't know. Did England over reacted? Who knows. All I know is that Galtieri was a sociopath, and that he died while incarcerated in a Correctional Facility.
> negotiating with dictators doesn't always end well.
This is true, ex: Saddam Hussein, Hitler, etc. But you know what, this was a conflict that could have been resolved by Lady Di in probably 1 day. People in Argentine loved her. She was seen as the Evita of Europe. On the other hand, people in Argentina didn't like Galtieri, and people in England didn't like Tatcher. Unfortunately, no one tried to diffuse the situation in any way. This is sad. Argentina and England were allies from 1810 to 1939, until WWII started and Perón took over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina_during_World_War_II The fact that during WWII 4,000 Argentines served with British armed services shows how many British descendants were living in Buenos Aires in the 1900s.
Maradona scored against England, not Britain. In athletics the UK competes as one nation: GB. In football the four UK nations compete separately; England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. IIRC this is FIFA recognition of the British origins of the beautiful game.
What do you not get? He takes the ball from the half way line on a solo run past 6 of some of the best players in the world and manages to score, while being tackled. I’m not a sports aficionado so struggle to come up with analogy to another sport but let’s just say it’s like reverse engineering an nvidia driver in a few weeks using nothing but vi and hexdump.
Very few people can control the ball whilst turning as he does at the beginning. And he beats six players, some of the best in the world.
As you get to higher and higher levels of football the quality of the defending increases so being able to play against the opposition as if you were eight is very rare.
It's a very good goal because of how many defenders he evades all on his own, but it's considered the "goal of the century" because of the context: a World Cup elimination game against the hated English.
I may be mistaken, but I believe this is also the 'Gardel Lives!' goal. A radio announcer got a bit excited and started shouting 'Gardel Viva!' into the broadcast for a good while.
Carlos Gardel, the Gardel shouted out, was a the best of all Tango singers and an Argentine legend/national hero [0], dying at 44 in a plane crash. Think someone on the same level as Elvis was to the US.
Sorry that I can't find the broadcast recording of that goal though!
My collectables were action hero cards (Van Damme doing splits, Schwarzenegger in Predator, Rocky flexing, etc) we got through random gum packages or some other little candy packing (I was maybe 9-10 in early 90s when this was popular, so not super sure). We traded and collected and I'm pretty sure I have the whole 50 cards or so still in a little baggie somewhere in storage.
I also remember Cincin... so perhaps that was where I got them too. Cheers! (from a transplant from Albania)
EDIT: Looking at those series of pics you linked to, I can say I do remember them. My friends collected them. It was the biggest thing happening in our lives.
You underestimate the love people across the world have for Argentina's football team.
I am from Kerala, India, and here is an article that might help paint the picture: https://bit.ly/33iRqnp .
Also, among many people who are not football fans, Maradona and Pele are the two names they'd know. Check out the crowds at this public event in India when Maradona visited: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIdwEZ31tTg
And I also didn't expect everyone abroad to respect Diego so much in this day and age. I think with his passing I'm getting to experience something that my generation has never experienced before, which is a glimpse into how the international community respects a part of Argentinian culture that is not grilled meat or Patagonia.
My heart is also kinda warmed by the fact he left us the same day Fidel did.
Maybe it’s because I’m Italian, but Patagonia and grilled meat are honestly the last things I think about when I think Argentina, probably because I’ve sadly not been there yet. To me your country looks like long-haired footballers, Borges, Soriano, tango, Buenos Aires, desaparecidos, a president who looked like the guy on Fantasy Island (Menem), and all those magnificent comicbook artists the country somehow produced (Quino, Josè Munoz, Carlos Sampayo, Horacio Altuna, Alberto Salinas, Lucho Olivera, the “adopted” Robin Wood...). It’s still very much a stereotype, but definitely something I can’t really associate to wilderness.
I'll represent the other, unpopular side: the man did as much if not more damage than all the glory he had.
As a footballer his career was finished pretty much 30 years ago. He left the '94 World Cup testing positive for drugs in what was a national embarrassment. His career as a manager was a disaster that existed purely off his prior fame. It's an embarrassment that we are unable to move on past things that happened four decades ago.
As a human being, he lacked morals, never recognized his uncountable illegitimate children, had no care for his body or self beyond the most infantile of desires, and his irrelevant words on a myriad topics were taken as gospel in an astounding display of hypocrisy.
I did not live to see his plays in the 80s. I remember his infamy of the 90s, along with the infamy of many, many public figures of Argentina of that time (along with the coked-up failure of a president Menem and the parade of similarly dubious public figures, all good friends of his too).
I remember being in elementary and my classmates emulating, respecting and excusing the horrible aspects of his character, and I certainly remember how that made dents in the morals of a generation that excused cheating as long as it got results done.
Having later on lived in more developed countries where that stuff just didn't fly, I'll go out on a limb and ascribe at least part of the failures of Latin America to these kinds of attitudes.
I was in Spain, and Maradona played there while he was not yet the shadow of himself that became later.
Lots of people admired this man but when he started doing stupid things like being totally drunk and stoned on public, most people stopped admiring him in all places but in Argentina.
I traveled to places like Bariloche and specially Buenos Aires for a very sort time,a month or so, and I could not understand almost the deity that such a bad example represented there.
But then an Argentinian friend explained it to me: You do not understand. It was because of the Malvinas, the English, Maradona represented something like a general that won over the same that defeated and humiliated us and so on...
And then it made sense. I had not made the connection before that.
And yes I agree with you that South America in general follows terrible role models. Places like Colombia or Venezuela look like paradise and are extremely wealthy but then the environment is Hell.
It is very interesting that Argentina and Chile are somewhat like the US and Europe but in reverse, the more to the South you go, the more serious people are, only that there is less and less people and land there to become significant.
First of all, most people admire Maradona as a footballer, not as a person. His unique skills are admired by fans and footballers all over the world, including Lineker, Emlyn Hughes, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Romario, Pep Guardiola, Mourinho, Zidane, Platini, Messi, etc. If you don't consider his abilities to be outstanding, then you are probably not a big football fan.
Secondly, what's your definition of "being a cheat" in football? Let me remind you that kicking Maradona during a match, trying to break his legs so he can no longer play, is cheating. Punching, pushing, hurting someone on purpose is cheating. Even one of the BBC commentators, Emlyn Hughes, said during the England vs Argentina match: "Oh, that was awful. He deserves a red car. Oh well, looks like we got away with it".
Yes, hurting a player on purpose is cheating (England 1986), faking a penalty is cheating (Germany 1990), and scoring a goal with your hand is also cheating (Argentina 1986).
This is why FIFA invented the concept of Fair Play, to stop the English players from hurting others. And also why FIFA invented the VAR, to stop Argentine players from scoring goals with their hand and Germans from faking penalties.
I don't disagree with you. But it is not like first world countries are inmune. Just look at a current president whose lies, cheating and incompetence are inexplicably excused by 70 million first world voters.
Oh I'm not saying that it's immune at all, but the outrage against Trump is at the very least visible and palpable and those who excuse them are visibly ashamed of the support.
But for those of us who did _not_ watch him in the 80s, those of us who didn't necessarily get a kick of him sticking it up the Brits, those of us who grew up in the 90s and 00s and watched him go from one drug-addled binge to the next and then seeing him grift on his career as a "manager"...
Well, there wasn't much glory for that. I understand the astounding emotional effect for those who saw him in the past, but for a lot of us watching from a different point in time there wasn't much that was positive.
What's your point? The documentary doesn't really touch on basically any of the points that this comment refers to as it ends around 1990.
I liked the documentary though, because I was also born in the 90s so I mostly saw the ugly part of Diego.
I guess my point is that the parent comments referred to Maradona rather than to Diego. The documentary made me realize that it is actually not him but all those Napoli fans that grasped him that caused his demise. If he were able to leave Napoli for a calmer retirement perhaps he would not become what he eventually became. It was the greed of Ferraino (Napoli FC President) which kept him in Napoli and caused him to become infamous, according to the documentary.
A love/hate relationship with the English who I seem to remember voted the infamous Hand of God goal the worst, and the same match's blistering run and finish against them the best ever.
That match was played in 1986, just 4 years after the Falklands short war between Argentina and England, and it was the first time the two national teams met after that war. For those involved it meant a lot more than a football match.
RIP Dieguito. I saw him at least a couple times live at the stadium in the 80s; he was out of this world.
I have a team mate from Argentina here in London. We were talking about Maradona a few weeks back.
I thought when talking about him that if he showed up in London, there would be a mob around him, but it would be 50% people wanting his signature and selfies, and the other 50% would want to give him a piece of their mind about the Hand of God goal.
He probably wouldn't have been safe in London. As a Man City supporter, I know my estimation of Aguero was dinted a little when I found out he was Maradona's son-in-law.
Why? I remember that handball goal (it was not "the hand of god", it was deliberate handball), as being the moment in my childhood that I realised I could not trust some adults. Some adults - it became clear to me then - were dishonest. Even if they were brilliant, talented and otherwise seemingly worthy of respect, they were capable of cheating and not caring. To a young child (I was approaching my 8th birthday at the time), that was shocking to the core, and I cried, not just at England losing the game but that he - and an entire team, an entire country of adults - had cheated and felt fine with it.
Part of my childhood ended with that goal. I know I'm not alone.
I would have been in the group wanting a selfie though.
Imagine how the Argentines felt when they saw the English team kicking Maradona, trying to hurt him and break his legs during the match, knowing it was a one man team. My point is, in football no one expects you to like your opponents. So there's nothing wrong with not liking Maradona :)
The parody "Church of Maradona" (yes, this is a thing!), or Maradonian Church might mark today as a black day, year 60 DD "Después de Diego" or "after Diego" ...
Poor Maradona holds the record for suffering the most number of fouls in a World Cup – 53, during the 1986 World Cup. He has a tattoo of Che Guevara on his arm, and a portrait of Fidel Castro tattooed on his left leg.-
Controversial figure, certainly to be missed by many ...
He had complete mastery of the ball. When Maradona ran with the ball or dribbled through the defence, he seemed to have the ball tied to his boots.
Discovered at the age of 8, the scouts asked for an ID, thinking they were being had. He played like an adult. Like very few adults, even then.-
Here's someone born with a special gift, of which he gave freely - and, expensively - twice the record holder for the most expensive transfer ever ...
Imagine if we had this silly VAR technology in the 80s. Then one of the most iconic moments in football history (hand of god) would have been reviewed and dismissed.
It's iconic because it was controversial but he got away with it, also because he was anyway a truly exceptional player. First thing that comes to mind being his other goal in the same match.
But otherwise using the hand to score a goal in football is not that much different from using a cheat device installed in a race car, taking an illegal shortcut in a marathon, or even performance enhancing drugs. Without drug testing many iconic wins wouldn't have been reviewed and dismissed.
“Premeditation” of course not. He didn’tr plan or trained for that exact play. But “intention”? For sure. He was 100% aware that he was doing an illegal movement in that split-second and he made the conscious decision to do it.
In soccer a non-goalkeeper player never uses the hand to touch the ball. There is no unconscious instinct to go after the ball with your hand. Quite the contrary btw. I just played for hobby and often when something will fall my instinct is to move my feet to ease the fall, not try to catch with my hand.
Exactly right. Football grew to be what it was from the slums in Latin America. It's always been human, analog, with all the faults this may have - perfect in its imperfection. If you've grown up watching the game, many of the memories are about some poor (intentional or not) calls -- offsides that weren't, handballs that were let to pass, penalties that weren't called, etc. And we still talk about these moments (or even still argue about them) at social gatherings and coffee shops. That's part of the appeal of the game. Celebrating the humanity of it, with all its mishaps. Similar to e.g. a vinyl record vs a lossless FLAC multi-channel recording - no denying the latter is superior, but the former has bugs (imperfections) that for some are features. Sadly, with more and more $$ being poured into the game (at least for big leagues like UEFA CL), we've lost some of this "analog-ness" of the sport. You gain something by losing something else.
I can get that analog simile... but not the toleration of cheating. Wasn't the 'hand of God' cheating? He knew he hand-balled and he didn't own up to it. To me that's such a grave betrayal of sportsmanship. Everyone else seems to see it as a bit of a joke? Why play at all if you're going to be dishonest? Seems like if we're going to tolerate that the whole thing is corrupt and rotten and has no honour.
It’s a fine line, for sure. Cheating is considered by some to be part of the game, too. The referee is there to prevent cheating, and without VAR they are liable to fail. We do not tolerate cheating, but but we can not prevent all forms of it, only punish it when it is uncovered with some certainty.
The litmus test for somebody’s football beliefs, of this generation at least, was the Luis Suarez handball against Ghana at WC 2010.
When I was younger, I was bitter and thought it wasn’t fair. But I’ve come around. Handballs are part of the game. The punishment in that circumstance is a red card and a multiple game suspension. Most people would have done the same thing in his boots. If you want to remove cheating, you’d have to ban people from the sport. But I think people would prefer to have controversy than to have a synthetically clean game.
(Where I draw the line is tackling with intent to injure, or intentionally escalating physically dangerous situations. That is never OK.)
People are gradually trying to make the game more binary. They tried to make the handball rule more black and white this season, and many players and most fans agree it’s a regression.
Because it is part of the game, hate it or love it. English players and fan where pissed, but Maradona got away with it, so respect. All of them would have done the same if they knew they could get away with it. Especially in such a big game.
Plus, it's just a game, nobody died. And it's fun to watch how a very small player beat a giant keeper through creativity and boldness.
You are missing the point. Football is not just a sport. It is not made of cold analysis and rules.
As Sartre said: Il calcio è una metafora della vita. Football is a metaphor of life, it is arduous, hard, difficult, full of suffering with redeeming glory. Miracles are possible, and there is always time.
I'm not sure why Sartre is quoted in Italian here, but this seems to be a spurious quote all the same. I could only find two sources with a version of that quote in French and neither had a citation of the original source. In fact, the only real quote from him I could find on soccer was «Au football, tout est compliqué par la présence de l'équipe adverse» ("In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.").
Interestingly, during my search I found an apt quote for this discussion from another 20th century French philosopher. Camus once said «Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois» ("What I know about morality, I owe to football"). I guess he would be missing the point here too.
Look that first goal broke my heart.
However, real football has uncertainty, it has games where you were robbed. Games where the referee blow the whistle a fraction before the ball hits the net (no goal). When a goal is given you can celebrate, especially in a live match. Now VAR robs something of the game. The second goal would not have happened with the first goal being ruled against. Not driven the next England side to semi-final to almost avenge the 1st goal. VAR is terrible. Football without VAR is like live - full of injustice, full of revenge, full off real emotions.
The rules of Tennis are much more discrete and mechanical than the rules of football.
For some examples, see the handball rule definition, the definition of when a penalty should be given when a foul occurs near the edge of the box, and the body parts that render an attacking player “offside”. What constitutes a foul vs a fair tackle, especially during set pieces. And, at what point in time should one draw the offside lines?
This year they’ve made enforcement of offsides extremely arbitrary, overturning goals by a distance smaller than the margin of error for the technology. The lines are drawn from players armpits. Armpits are a continuous body feature, and different humans have different dimensions.
In short, two good referees can review an identical event from omnipotent angles, and reasonably come to divergent conclusions.
It's the flawed moments that separate this sport from those that are basically boring scientific experiments for identifying the fastest, strongest or the most accurate.
You surely wouldn't design it deliberately with those flaws and if the flaws were designed on purpose they'd fail at contributing to entertainment, but ripping them out doesn't necessarily make it better.
Just like you wouldn't want to fix US elections in any way at all if their purpose was entertainment. Football's purpose is.
Unpopular opinion: He was a gifted footballer but was a total piece of shit in nearly all other aspects of life including abusing women and minors, to say nothing of his complete lack of sportsmanship on the pitch.
I hate that this guy gets lionized. To me it just underlines everything wrong with football.
He was flawed, but far from being a piece of shit. I strongly suggest you put aside your prejudices about him and try to understand both his lights and shadows. He was always on the side of the downtrodden and poor people everywhere. He never abused minors, that one was Pelé. And he always cared about his colleagues, you won't find anyone in football that says or has said otherwise.
Witnesses can be bought. Pictures can't be fully trusted (unless you think you can see someone's age floating above their head). Give me judicial processes and hard evidence if there's any.
This is a topic I loathe, and I will not search for and provide any of the photographic evidence even if they've been published on many tabloids as they're absolutely sickening, not to mention possibly illegal on some jurisdictions.
There's no one who's willing to initiate court proceedings about these matters (it's particularly hard on countries like Cuba), so if the existing public evidence is not enough for you, then nothing will be, so there's no further discussion to be had as it's unlikely any further developments will occur now that he's died.
I fail to see how "lionizing" someone for their performance or their actions in a specific domain undermines all the wrongs one has done in their life. Sure, perhaps most people will only remember him as a great footballer without talking about the wrong actions he has done during his life, but a) most of them wouldn't have cared anyway and b) one can still see both sides of the coin and admit one's wrongdoing despite one's good performance or results.
I'm far from being a connoisseur about football and sports in general though, so I don't exactly know what this guy has done, but this can be applied to any man on this Earth.
It’s a question of the message sent to others: if the unpleasant parts are omitted or excused, there’s a good chance that some people will conclude that those things don’t matter if you’re successful enough. That attitude has negative effects on society since the bad behavior happens even if the success never does.
Well... I admire Kevin Spacey's acting career and think he is an amazing actor. That (for me) doesn't clash with the fact that I detest his alleged molestation of people.
And similarly with other Uruguayan football player who apparently is an asshole but I have to give it to him that his football playing abilities are amazing.
A lot of people in my country also like/dislike him for his political opinions. A lot of people do claim he was a good person. Others hated him or mocked him. He had transcended football.
Yeah, they prefer someone who doesn't speak his mind, like Messi. That way they can enjoy the footballer without having to deal with any contradictions that person might have.
It wasn’t just a big match. Just four years after the war in the south Atlantic, it was perhaps the biggest international match in the brief history of international matches.
to see how legendary this man was, you just have to watch Maradona, the HBO documentary. which is also arguably one of the best sports documentaries. He was a polarizing figure no doubt, but this man won Argentina the world cup single-handed. ahh see the pun. he also made napoli a backwater team into the powerhouse it is today. n remember most of the matches he won, he was high on coke i.e not playing at his full potential.
I saw him live in Foxboro MA in the 1994 world cup match vs Greece (before he was disqualified for drug use). The crowd reaction to him was amazing. Every time he ran near the section I was in the crowd would go crazy just because he was close, even if the ball was far away. It was an amazing experience.
You clearly lack the political context of England/UK and Argentina, and what that goal represented to Argentinians.
With or without coke, that was a moment of liberation, and he alone carried the Argentinean team on his shoulders in 1986 when they won the World Cup.
One needs more than coke to do what he did in 1986. One needs to be extraordinarily gifted, only for the likes of Pele, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Garrincha, Messi, Zico, Cruyff, and Maradona could ever do.
It was more a feeling of revenge than liberation. In 1982 my family and the entire country was at war with an Argentinean dictator, when suddenly Margaret Tatcher, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, instead of de-escalating the situation with the Argentine dictator decided to go to war with a country that was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, Argentine people felt betrayed by England. Both countries were close friends for more than 100 years, since 1810 when Britain and Argentina signed a treaty of friendship proposed by Woodbine Parish. His cousin, John P. Robertson, was a good friend of General San Martin. Argentina and England had 2 enemies in common: Spain and France. Both countries were allies until the beginning of world war 2, when General Perón became a good friend of Mussolini. The dictators and facists Videla a Galtieri went to war with the UK, US and NATO. In 1982 there was no democracy in Argentina, and no diplomats to stop the war. There was no Congress and Senate at that time, making the war illegal. The fact that Maradona scored an "illegal" goal against England was seen as a revenge for loosing a war that no one wanted to fight. No one except Tatcher.
Sim hermano. When I mentioned “liberation” I meant the psychological catarse of the moment those 2 goals must have inflicted and meant to the Argentinean people. I totally understand how Tatcher used this war (as it is common to Great Britain) to pump popularity up when neo-liberalism was not really working. UK military killed some ~1500 Argentineans to achieve so. And while they thought they were the smartest, Maradona showed them otherwise.
"It was more a feeling of revenge than liberation. In 1982 my family and the entire country was at war with an Argentinean dictator, when suddenly Margaret Tatcher, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, instead of de-escalating the situation with the Argentine dictator decided to go to war with a country that was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, Argentine people felt betrayed by England."
It was more a feeling of revenge than liberation. In 1939 my family and the entire country was at war with an GERMAN dictator, when suddenly WINSTON CHURCHILL, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, instead of de-escalating the situation with the GERMAN dictator decided to go to war with a country that was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, GERMAN people felt betrayed by England.
He would have been even more outrageous without coke. He said as much on camera: on the pitch he was fine, “beyond the midfield line I was the commander in chief”; it was off the pitch that he struggled and needed coke. He started sniffing in Barcelona, where he didn’t gel with the team off the pitch and probably felt lonely and restless, but his football was already fantastic. Without the addiction he would have had a longer career, and likely would have carried Argentina in ‘94 too.
I hated his guts as a kid because of 1990 (another hand of god, and the feeling he took from Baggio and Schillaci’s Italy a final that was our god-given right), but I’ve come to realize later that he was one of the last great footballers to be (flawed) men first and athletes second. The way he spoke of guilt and regret, his embarrassingly public mistakes... they made him more real than a robotic superman like Cristiano Ronaldo will ever be. And some of his highlight reels are ridiculous.
Maradona’s documentary on HBO is excellent and really captures how incredibly far his talent was. Not just an outlier. Completely out of this world. He basically won a World Cup by himself.
Actually he did a great job with the Argentina's coach at that time: Carlos Bilardo. He basically revolutionized Soccer and only who really understand tactics knows what he really did.
An away game. Full house. Very important European game. And this guy is just dancing around while juggling a ball in the air, untied boots, singing the song, feeling good.
Jurgen Klinsmann, who was playing for the home team that day, said a few of his teammates stopped warming up to watch him. I reckon the sight of this crazy little fella just psyched to dance and play ball, off-handedly showing more skills than most players on the planet will ever have, must have sowed quite a few seeds of doubt in Bayern’s players.
RIP :( I'm playing this now in his memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0KCbZ7L17I . He's the greatest footballer that I had the chance to watch, and I consider myself lucky for that. Probably nobody will come again to that level, the game and the spirit of the game has changed too much for that to happen.
For many personal reasons I wont mention here Maradona was a real source of joy for me (something sadly not too common in life). Descansa en paz Dieguito querido, nunca se te escapo la tortuga.
It's presumably here because HN is not parochial and Maradona was a Michael Jordan level global superstar, with some claiming him as the greatest ever at his sport.
Well, in direct comparison Pelé seems a bit deficient in tragic dark sides. That makes him greater in many ways, but also less of an attention magnet. On the list of Roman emperors people can name, Nero will rank quite close to the top.
Maradona is the Michael Jackson of football. Out of this world both on and off pitch/stage. A larger than life charismatic eccentric. See the other goal he scored in the hand of God game (a world cup semi final no less) to see a complete picture of what he was all about.
I think he meant Michael Jackson both for the eccentricity and talent. If I were to think of an analog to Michael Jordan in football, I think of Pele. Although, in my opinion, and also relatively speaking, I think Pele accomplished a lot more than Michael Jordan in the corresponding sport.
It's interesting that you've never heard of one of the most famous people in the world. Probably a reflection of insular American media perhaps. It doesn't work in reverse, Babe Ruth was one of the most famous people in the world even though most people around the world don't follow baseball.
10 years ago, Captain Crunch was my next door neighbor. Yes, that Captain Crunch. One time he asked me, in reference to the actor's name being mentioned in the media, "Who's Brad Pitt?".
I laughed my ass off, because I decided he was the only person in LA County to have asked that question anytime recently. Incidentally, I guarantee you he has no idea who Diego Maradona is.
Crunch also once asked me, 2 days after the election, "Did Obama win?". He was traveling overseas and was "out of the loop". I saved the email and laugh about it to this day.
(If you don't know who Crunch is, and you're using this website, that's funny.)
I'm still not sure why everyone assumes everyone else must have heard of this person, and downvotes everyone who hasn't. There's a weird, exclusive, gatekeeping vibe going on here, and it's extremely unwelcoming to people who didn't have a very specific background growing up. My background didn't include whatever sport this person apparently played, so I don't know them, so I'm somehow a bad person? I don't get it.
Everyone is being unnecessarily rude to you. It really isn’t unreasonable that you wouldn’t have heard of this guy if you are some combination of an American, not a sports fan, and in your thirties or younger. However in his day he was considered one of the two best players all time in the most popular sport in the world. That resulted in a fame that far exceeded the world of sport. He also basked in the life of celebrity that ended up compounding his renown even further. He was probably at one point one of the 10 most famous people on the planet. It can therefore be surprising for people who lived through that time that other people might not be aware of him.
That you hadn't heard of him was perhaps not sufficient basis for feelings of astonishment. I guess it's just surprising to people of a certain age, who overlooked the age/background of yourself and others. But I really don't think it was intended to be exclusionary or make you feel unwelcome. The down votes were probably b/c of the Michael Jordan comment. If there is a rule that every submission must have a tech, science or similar angle, it appears there are exceptions. And most people are OK with it.
It's possible that he was sort of a big deal? Just something to consider next time you are thrown for a loop while scrolling to find the latest Python news.
Hey, as you go on posting irrelevant variations of this, I'm just curious: how old are you? Are you aware that the World existed before the Internet or the year 2000 and that this guy happened to be the best player in the most popular sport in the World who also scored a goal that was considered pretty much impossible until ten years later a dude called Ronaldo (the original one) scored something like it against a much weaker team in a national league, not in a World Cup, a global event that happens to draw pretty much the same viewership than the Olympics?
So yeah, outside your own limited experience Maradona was a huge deal.
Never a big fan myself though yet dep, barrilete cósmico and hugs to all the Argentinian folks, it's difficult to convey why and how much they feel what they do about this flawed individual, but they do.
> Are you aware that the World existed before the Internet or the year 2000
This is the weird, obsessive, gatekeeping vibe I'm talking about, as if not knowing one specific person from one specific country makes you utterly ignorant.
I don't expect people like you to know about Emmy Noether, even though she was an important figure, and I certainly wouldn't degrade them for not knowing what she accomplished.
Maybe it does. I would consider you utterly ignorant if you didn't know anyone known by several billion people.
There was this concept of general knowledge you used to aspire to which is becoming quickly replaced by the atomization of information among tiny communities which go unaware of each other, this might end up as some postmodern version of the Middle Ages. As I'm old-fashioned I don't think that's a good idea, but folks don't tend to care about general good ideas if they find them personally unpleasant in some way, that's another recent trend.
Oh, I had to become familiar with Emmy Noether BTW, when you do Particle Physics it's hard not to. I can write down the two versions of her most famous theorem we referred to. I think the less useful one was nicely left for you to learn about from a review by Hill from 1951, but I'd have to look it up.
The great thing about having seen grown the Internet when gopher was awe inspiring as a teenager is that you know how to work with books, paper and your memory plus you know all the tricks after having been googling for 22 years. You're also aware of lots of stuff that isn't online yet and where to find it physically. Pretty cool huh? Too bad that's dying.
Do you know anything interesting about say Artin's algebra books now that we've been talking about Emmy? For instance why I'm mentioning Artin? What about that famous Hilbert's actually feminist quip involving Emmy's application? That would have been nice upper level general knowledge for instance, not limited to STEM people.
Well I insist it does because the first thing anyone with enough intellectual humility to get beyond utter ignorance would be to look up who this guy everyone is talking about was instead of repeating ad nauseam that they don't know anything about him, so this can't be objectively relevant.
What information gives that to anyone except the empty personal feelings of someone who needs to post something just because? I see this a lot lately, and it's just frankly boring noise, of the whiny kind.
And then goes with name-dropping and stating that people who can talk about popular culture can't possibly know anything high-brow, which it even isn't in this case (high-brow might be for instance Adorno's book on Mahler to give an example I could barely follow). It's utter ignorance assuming that everyone you're prejudiced against for inane reasons can't possibly be perchance better educated than you are, could you imagine, oh the horror. There are several varieties of utter ignorance at play here IMO.
Gotcha. I only meant the sheer fact that he didn't know who he was, was not in itself anything that makes him ignorant. But yes, it was his response/reaction to discovering the story of this "mysterious" person that indeed took a surprising turn. Thanks for clarifying.
"General knowledge" only extended to sports figures in the general area you were from, anyway. I wouldn't have known about some Argentine in any event.
The ease with which he played, and lived, was the stuff of legend. There's something tragic in it as well, since it probably contributed to his early passing.
A true legend, I clearly remember childhood days when every kid in my neighborhood wanted to be Maradona (and this was in India, where we did not even play football that much!!).
I have followed and played football since I was born. I was lucky to be in Mexico 1986 and have seen the evolution of football. Today the sport have evolved so much, diets, rules, salaries, marketing, tactics with this in mind players are less passionate about their teams and care more about the looks and salaries, this clearly affects how they perform in the field. When Maradona led Argentina in a World Cup against a very very strong English team, and score that goal is something that no matter if you are argentinian or not, this can't be quantified, this passion is not numbers. Here we are analytical and love numbers. Messi in numbers is better, but the feeling and the emotions you generate in a crowd is what makes Maradona special. He caused that in Napoli, Argentina, Mexico, anywhere, he is D10S
An incredible talent on the pitch, a winner and a warrior. He never gave up when soccer was much more permissive and violent. He touched the ball with his left foot as an angel.
A pity he hurt himself abusing of drugs all his life.
¡Eterno, pibe!
Given the historical context, we will never see something similar to what this man did. God level skills proved during the '86 World Cup (and '90), Napoli and the Argentine league.
yes, well you cannot compare players from different times. In his time Pele was the best player in the World. In 1958, he was 17 and was the first black player in the Brazilian national team. There was some heat because of that. He went there and destroyed the prejudice and the adversaries. In the 1970, he wasn't playing anymore, but he did a comeback, getting in shape and winning the World Cup in Mexico with an outstanding performance. Was Maradona the best of his time? I don't agree. He was the best in his prime time, but it was no longer than 4-6 years. In the 80s, 90s we had definitely other players which were as good as him or better (depending on the time period): Socrates, Zico, Lothar Matthaus, Michel Platini, Hugo Sanchez,Ruud Gullit, its a long list. In the 90s even longer.
Pele won 3 world cups. He won 2 world titles with Santos. Santos used to travel around the world like the globetrotters because of him. He scored more than 1000 goals.
But Pele played at a time where football was not as polished as today. That also includes Maradona. Messi, Ronaldo are much much better football players than them both. But of course with the strong competition today it is a lot harder to accomplish what Pele and Maradona did.
Football is a team game, and that is a lot more true today than three, four decades ago.
you are comparing apples with oranges. You cannot compare football from the 50s,70s with football from today, simply because the whole society changed. If football wasn't as polished as today, to out stand in this environment is even harder. Every injury could mean the end of your career. Pele was raised poor, served the army, played professionally from 1950 - 1977(!!)
Messi in another hand is "professional" since he was 6. He moved to Barcelona at age of 10 to go through an hormonal treatment and since then he is exposed to professional football. Such chance was impossible back in the 50s for a black kid in Brazil or anyone else actually.
I was not really a fan and I disagreed with him on his political postures. But this is a big deal in Latin america. It is hard not to get excited listening to this song. More like a beautiful poem.
The real spirit of soccer. I was his fan and I would miss him so much. But the game continues that is the only way to immortalize him.
If players are allowed to play in Europe, fans that are under 35 years should be allowed inside the stadiums. Life must continue, empty stadiums turn fields to graveyards.
The community here on HN has, at its core, a common interest in technology and startups. That then implies that many have an interest in programming and business.
But not all.
So people here do have a wide range of interests, and others will share those non-core interests. Sometimes they strike a chord, sometimes they don't. But that's the way communities work.
There's potentially a lot to discuss about Maradona. The exquisite talent, marred by the personal life and "The Incident" with the "Hand of God", and there are parallels there with programmers who are amazingly skilled, and yet complete jerks to the people they work with.
So there are reasons why this is not entirely out of place.
Finally, if this wasn't an honest question, and you actually believe that the submission does not belong here, then I give you this from the guidelines[0]:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. ... If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
While a great football player, also serial abuser of minors. He had sex [and offspring] with many girls between 10 and 12. Even took pictures on the spot with some of them.
Argentina is have a three day duel for this guy, portrayed as a hero, with honorific status.
As someone born in Argentina, I can't help feeling disgust and shame on this.
He was definitely a drug addict, a tax cheat, an unfaithful husband, a horrible non-father to his bastard kid, and a pretty poor football coach. He likely had sex with young girls, in his wild years. But 10 or 12 seems a bit too much even for a coked-up sex fiend.
Maradona was an excellent football player without a doubt but all he’s done for decades now is getting a renown for being a cocaine addict, a communist, and a pederast. As per the rest of your comment I love your country but you have some very deep seated problems and having a three day duel for this piece of shit shows them very well.
It happens everywhere. It doesn't mean 50% of the country agrees with their decision. Populists politics use anything in hand to survive, any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth but the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.
> He had sex [and offspring] with many girls between 10 and 12.
Do you have a link for that? I can't find that in Wikipedia. If is well known he had a lot of affairs and extramarital children, but I don't remember something like this.
And there was the Best Goal in the Soccer History in the same match... to the country which invented the Soccer, I think England still cry for this, they never recovered.
From a technical standpoint Messi is probably better.
But what makes Maradona the best football player in the world is that he transcended football. His football changed things. Brought pride to both Naples and Argentina more than a football trophy could've.
The difference is that Messi so far failed to deliver a world cup. Just didn't happen. Maradona played a minor role in bringing home the 1978 world cup and took the lead role in closing the deal on the 1986 one. Messi has so far not delivered on that front.
World cup is a different beast from the Champions league. The CL takes place over a much longer period of time and teams can better recover physically and emotionally. The world cup is a tour the force that Messi was never able to dominate and win. Messi is technically superior, no doubt, but was never able to consistently shine under psychological pressure. Delivering under pressure is what the likes of Maradona and CR7 have been able to do and that's what makes many soccer lovers call them the "best".
Pelé is definitely the choice of many pundits, but he played most of his club soccer in the Brazilian leagues. In Brazil's World Cup efforts he had a superb team around him.
Maradona is given the nod because he played in Spain and Italy, in addition to Argentina, and dominated a World Cup with a much weaker team.
I am Brazilian(and a major football/Pelé fan), so heavily biased here.
And I don't see the competitiveness of leagues/or time holding up as an argument.
Pelé dominated his competition for a long time, he won national and continental championships multiple times as well as being the star in two world cups, one of them at the age of 17, his numbers are better as well.
Maradona in the meantime spent a solid amount of time in both Europe and South America and wasn't continental champion, so relatively speaking, he wasn't as dominant in his time as Pelé was during his own.
And if you argue that competitiveness is ever increasing, you have Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo with much better numbers and a decade-long dominance, I would argue even Zidane, Romario and Ronaldo above him in terms of results.
Maradona comes from a time when governments were highlighting football for need of national unity. Pelé was used for media in the same way.
He's definitely one of the greatest when it comes to how symbolic he is to the game, he represents Argentina's rise to the top of the football world, which has followed as Argentina has consistently put great players since, but I have high reservations as to calling him the best of all time.
Great response! Pelé coming to the US was a HUGE kick start to soccer in this country and I will never forget him kicking a ball with President Gerald Ford at the White House.
You are probably right about the other players that you mentioned as well, and given some distance from their remarkable achievements we will absolutely see them in even higher regard than we already do.
That said, "Pelé: Birth of a Legend" is just a terrible movie... but I am trying not to hold that against him.
> Pele was great, but I doubt he would have been that great in modern football.
This argument has never made any sense to me, in any sport or discipline. If you directly bring a 25-year old Pele or Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky to 2020 using a time machine, they won't measure up to their peers. If you send an average math professor from a mid-tier college back to 1680s England, they'd dazzle Newton. Because standards and the base level of skill have gone up across the board since then.
That doesn't mean average math professors today are smarter than Newton. And it doesn't mean the average professional footballer today is actually better than Pele or any of the other greats of the past. Bring baby Pele (or Jordan or Gretzky) to 2020 and (barring injuries) he'd be a world-beater in 20 years.
I really don’t think you know what you are talking about. Pele played at a time when football was even tougher and harder tackling than in Maradona’s time. The fouling of Pele is what caused yellow/red cards to be introduced
He played in a time where Soccer was almost amateur. See the criminal fouls to Maradona in the 80's. In comparison Pele was treated like a sweet flower.
I really don’t think you know what you are talking about. Pele played at a time when football was even tougher and harder tackling than in Maradona’s time. The fouling of Pele is what caused yellow/red cards to be introduced.
Even this specific comment of yours was dead. I had to vouch for it to reply to you.
Somebody/bot is flagging all your comments instantly. email the mods hn@ycombinator.com to ask them to remove this. Seems like none of your comments are against the rules
If we focus on world cup only for example, Pele had the benefit of playing with the best team in the world. Maradona basically won the world cup on his own.
I face palmed when I saw Pele say "We will play soccer together in heaven ".
Pele was he even a good soccer player. Nobody knows. He never played in a European club or tournament against and with the world's best players. He choose to spend he entire career playing in the USA. The US, at that time, was not big into soccer. Had no good players or soccer environment. They had a lot of amateurs and showmanship and if you were just a little above the performance and skills on an average European player you could easily run around the corner with the American player and that was what Pele did. There exist no proof that he was particlar good a playing soccer. He might have been but your guess is as good as mine but his marketing skills must have been amazing. He soccer skills probably not so much.
Maradona on the other hand. He was an amazing player. RIP
Original footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wVho3I0NtU
An interview many years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOz2uGMTA2w
That depends on what you mean by hot: the highest temperature ever recorded in Mexico City is 38C, so my friends from northern Mexico and from, say, Arizona would say that no, Mexico City does not have even a day or two when it gets hot. (Of course, 38C is probably much too hot for comfort if you are playing football.)
But back to June 22, 1986.
I'm pretty sure the Mexican national weather service knows exactly how hot it was on June 22, 1986 in Mexico City, but unfortunately their website doesn't seem to have day-by-day data available for download (at least not that far back). I did find a table of monthly average high temperatures [1], and for June 1986 in Mexico City (see "Distrito Federal" in the table) the average high temperature was 23.6C. The Weather Underground says that on June 22, 1986 the highest temperature was 75F [2], which is 23.9C. (Why doesn't the Weather Underground default to Celsius for visitors from Mexico?)
So it looks like I would have won my (very conservative) bet that the temperature was somewhere between 15C and 25C that day.
> Maybe the TV commentator said it was a hot day.
This is definitely possible!
1. The commentator could have assumed that because the game was in Mexico it would be hot! This happens all the time. I have explained to dozens of people that Mexico City doesn't really get hot, most are surprised. Of course, when I remind them Mexico City is at an altitude of 2.2km they usually believe me about the lack of heat.
2. The commentator could have known it was 25C and still thought that was hot for a football match.
[1] https://smn.conagua.gob.mx/tools/DATA/Climatolog%C3%ADa/Pron...
[2] https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/mx/mexico-city/MM...
What's your definition of "being a cheat" in football? Let me remind you that kicking Maradona during a match, trying to break his legs so he can no longer play, is cheating. Punching, pushing, hurting someone on purpose is cheating. Even one of the BBC commentators, Emlyn Hughes, said during the England vs Argentina match: "Oh, that was awful. He deserves a red car. Oh well, looks like we got away with it".
And yes, scoring a goal with your hand is also cheating. Did Maradona scored a goal with his hand? Yes. Did the English team kick and hurt Maradona the entire match. Yes, I saw it with my own eyes.
This is why FIFA invented the concept of Fair Play, to stop players from kicking and hurting others. And why they invented the VAR, to stop them from scoring goals with their hand.
Peter Shilton's Handball Maradona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Shilton's_Handball_Marad...
Maradona's contribution for the Argies was absolutely awesome. He had style, class, aggression, a massive swagger and an incredible situation awareness. There were another 22 people on the pitch that day but:
There is only one Maradona, one Maradona ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccNkksrfls
Scoring against Getafe is not comparable to scoring against England in a world cup, specially when it is Argentina against England (in a game England invented) only a few years against the Falklands war. It's a great goal by Messi, but Maradona's goal has a place in history books.
It seems the intersection of football and politics makes for outstanding games. Cometh the hour, cometh the man
It seems that soccer was invented in China, not in England. [0]
[0]: https://www.athleticscholarships.net/history-of-soccer-footb...
> Records trace the history of soccer back more than 2,000 years ago to ancient China. Greece, Rome, and parts of Central America also claim to have started the sport; but it was England that transitioned soccer, or what the British and many other people around the world call “football,” into the game we know today.
In short: everyone lays claim to kicking around a ball, but England invented the modern game
The first rules established in England allowed no such thing. Forward passes were still not permitted (like Rugby). It was in Scotland where the offside rule that loosely resembles what it is today was actually invented, allowing players to spread themselves a bit more around the pitch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_Game#Queens_Park_F...
After a few thumping defeats, the English sides had to evolve to remain competetive.
Arguably Scotland but we're used to England stealing our inventions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_Game#Queens_Park_F...
They were the #1 ranked ELO team for a while in the late 1980s :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Football_Elo_Ratings#Lis...
Just as a note, I'm not English nor do I have English heritage and don't 'support' England.
Another remarkable feature is that it happened at 2200m, in July, with 1986 air quality. Futbol in Mexico still looks different because so much of it is played at altitude...and so much of European futbol is played near sea level.
Hopefully, its most remarkable feature will never be surpassed: massive geopolitical significance in the wake of the war in the south Atlantic.
100%! The 80s was an era of defensive brutality, when horrendos tackles from behind were allowed. Tricky dribblers like Maradona were routinely hacked down. Even Emlyn Hughes said during the England vs Argentina match: "Oh, that was awful tackle by Terry Fenwick. He deserves a red car. Oh well, looks like he got away with it".
- Maradona's dominance as a player throughout the -86 cup - The Falkland Islands war just a few years prior giving this game a special tension and attention - It's beauty relative other goals at the time
My comment is just a reflection to often heard comments about it being the greatest goal ever. Judging it just by what the clip shows, it has faded for me. But the historical context is important.
What? I honestly can’t remember of a single one. Which goals are you thinking of?
Now try to imagine people trying to hack you down (totally normal defending back then) and tugging your shirt, in the blazing heat, at altitude, against a team that humiliated your country in a war a few years earlier...and instead you waltz around all of them, make them look amateurish, and knock them out of the biggest sports tournament on the planet at a sport they invented.
Soccer is not grid iron, nor is it rugby but back in the day, defence could be quite a bit more robust than it is now. Footie players are not built like the second row and if you happen to apply six studs (cleats I think for the left pondians) at speed to the side of someone's knee then it will not end well.
If you look carefully, you will notice that Maradona doesn't simply whizz around defenders: he completely humiliates our boys by finding space and making the ball go there with him. The bloody thing is attached to his toe when he needs it to be so and then he simply flicks it into the net, almost as an afterthought. He barely looks at it - he know where it is because he has told it to be there.
Genius.
[1]See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braveheart for background.
The big mistakes by the Brits were made beforehand by not taking seriously the noises being made by the junta, when there might have been a chance to contain things.
It’s very sad that what was once a strong relationship between the two nations went downhill with Peron and since then the islands / evil Brits theme gets rolled out to distract from internal issues.
The Argentine people have certainly suffered appallingly under dictators and poor leadership.
And yes, without the sentiment that followed winning back the islands Thatcher and her then future would probably have played out very differently, but don’t doubt that there was very strong support in the UK at large for the recovery of the islands.
According to my family, a bunch of people, probably fisherman or metallurgic workers, raised a flag in one of the island (we don't know why) and then Galtieri sent some troops to protect these people. When the fascists arrived to the islands, they were hostile to the residents. And then hell broke loose, and Galtieri was at war with the UK, US and NATO. A complete lunatic. Once the war started, the propaganda machinery took over. People fighting the dictator didn't want this war, but knew very well it would weaken the Military junta.
> Do you really think Galtieri would have gone for any kind of political settlement
No. The ERP (People's Revolutionary Army) and Montoneros were fighting against Galtieri, in the streets of Buenos Aires, so the Military Junta needed a distraction. However, my mom always said that the only person who could stop that war was Lady Di. She was very popular in Argentina, people used to compare her with Evita. Maybe my mom was wrong, she was a bit of dreamer after all.
> The big mistakes by the Brits were made beforehand by not taking seriously the noises being made by the junta
True. Galtieri never thought England would go to war. I'm not sure why, probably because he had bad intel, or was a complete sociopath.
> It’s very sad that what was once a strong relationship between the two nations went downhill with Peron
Yes, it's sad. After Peron everything went downhill. My mom is an English teacher, and was born in Argentina. She loves the English culture and people (Ladi Di, Churchill, etc), and the war did not change any of that, but deep inside I think she feels betrayed by England (by Tatcher, the media, and even the Queen). But she knows very well what happened and why, and finds comfort in thinking that the war helped restore democracy in her country. She was a proud Montonera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montoneras
All the best!
> Although the ERP continued for a while under the leadership of Enrique Gorriarán Merlo, by late 1977 the guerrilla threat had been eradicted or gone underground.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montoneros
> The Montoneros were effectively finished off by 1977, although their "Special Forces" did fight on until 1981. The Montoneros tried to disrupt the World Cup Football Tournament being hosted in Argentina in 1978 by launching a number of bomb attacks. In late 1979, the Montoneros launched a "strategic counteroffensive" in Argentina, and the security forces killed more than one hundred of the exiled Montoneros, who had been sent back to Argentina after receiving special forces training in camps in the Middle East.
In Argentina, Maradona was seen as Evita and Che Guevara. The Champion of the poor, and the face of anti-imperialism.
* Right-wing Peronism: Videla, Military junta, AAA.
* Left-wing Peronism: Montoneros, students, socialists.
Up to 30,000 people disappeared, and more than 12,000 were tortured by the right-wing fascists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War
https://www.britannica.com/event/Dirty-War
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42175752
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/22/argentina.ianb...
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2019-0...
I'm pretty sure Leopoldo Galtieri wanted the war more than Thatcher did; he started it, after all.
Also, negotiating with dictators doesn't always end well. Look at what happened in 1939.
100%. The ERP (People's Revolutionary Army) and Montoneros were fighting in the streets of Buenos Aires, so Galtieri and the Military Junta needed a distraction. A big one.
> he started it, after all
This is probably a myth created by the media. A bunch of people, probably fisherman or metallurgic workers raised a flag, and hell broke loose. Things escalated very quickly after that. All we know is that a small group of people raised a flag in one of the island and then Galtieri was at war with the UK, US and NATO. The Military junta killing Argentine people, and going to war with a powerful country, a country that defeated the German Empire. It's crazy! Was the war inevitable? I don't know. Did England over reacted? Who knows. All I know is that Galtieri was a sociopath, and that he died while incarcerated in a Correctional Facility.
> negotiating with dictators doesn't always end well.
This is true, ex: Saddam Hussein, Hitler, etc. But you know what, this was a conflict that could have been resolved by Lady Di in probably 1 day. People in Argentine loved her. She was seen as the Evita of Europe. On the other hand, people in Argentina didn't like Galtieri, and people in England didn't like Tatcher. Unfortunately, no one tried to diffuse the situation in any way. This is sad. Argentina and England were allies from 1810 to 1939, until WWII started and Perón took over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina_during_World_War_II The fact that during WWII 4,000 Argentines served with British armed services shows how many British descendants were living in Buenos Aires in the 1900s.
This was lauded as goal of the century.
This goal was the 0x5f3759df of soccer.
As you get to higher and higher levels of football the quality of the defending increases so being able to play against the opposition as if you were eight is very rare.
Carlos Gardel, the Gardel shouted out, was a the best of all Tango singers and an Argentine legend/national hero [0], dying at 44 in a plane crash. Think someone on the same level as Elvis was to the US.
Sorry that I can't find the broadcast recording of that goal though!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Gardel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLVmBJEzXhk
Following Pelé, of course.
A trip down memory lane... RiP.
His best goals (according to YT): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XegYZ8y3xMY&ab_channel=FIFAT...
Everybody was collecting them. What a shame he wasted such an amazing talent with drugs.
I’m a little sad that one of my childhood heroes is gone.
Hasta siempre, Diego Armando Maradona!
I also remember Cincin... so perhaps that was where I got them too. Cheers! (from a transplant from Albania)
EDIT: Looking at those series of pics you linked to, I can say I do remember them. My friends collected them. It was the biggest thing happening in our lives.
I am from Kerala, India, and here is an article that might help paint the picture: https://bit.ly/33iRqnp .
Also, among many people who are not football fans, Maradona and Pele are the two names they'd know. Check out the crowds at this public event in India when Maradona visited: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIdwEZ31tTg
RIP.
My heart is also kinda warmed by the fact he left us the same day Fidel did.
Thanks for the link, I had no idea.
And then Maradonna.
https://twitter.com/QueenWillRock/status/1331645705392451590
Diego.
As a footballer his career was finished pretty much 30 years ago. He left the '94 World Cup testing positive for drugs in what was a national embarrassment. His career as a manager was a disaster that existed purely off his prior fame. It's an embarrassment that we are unable to move on past things that happened four decades ago.
As a human being, he lacked morals, never recognized his uncountable illegitimate children, had no care for his body or self beyond the most infantile of desires, and his irrelevant words on a myriad topics were taken as gospel in an astounding display of hypocrisy.
I did not live to see his plays in the 80s. I remember his infamy of the 90s, along with the infamy of many, many public figures of Argentina of that time (along with the coked-up failure of a president Menem and the parade of similarly dubious public figures, all good friends of his too).
I remember being in elementary and my classmates emulating, respecting and excusing the horrible aspects of his character, and I certainly remember how that made dents in the morals of a generation that excused cheating as long as it got results done.
Having later on lived in more developed countries where that stuff just didn't fly, I'll go out on a limb and ascribe at least part of the failures of Latin America to these kinds of attitudes.
I was in Spain, and Maradona played there while he was not yet the shadow of himself that became later.
Lots of people admired this man but when he started doing stupid things like being totally drunk and stoned on public, most people stopped admiring him in all places but in Argentina.
I traveled to places like Bariloche and specially Buenos Aires for a very sort time,a month or so, and I could not understand almost the deity that such a bad example represented there.
But then an Argentinian friend explained it to me: You do not understand. It was because of the Malvinas, the English, Maradona represented something like a general that won over the same that defeated and humiliated us and so on...
And then it made sense. I had not made the connection before that.
And yes I agree with you that South America in general follows terrible role models. Places like Colombia or Venezuela look like paradise and are extremely wealthy but then the environment is Hell.
It is very interesting that Argentina and Chile are somewhat like the US and Europe but in reverse, the more to the South you go, the more serious people are, only that there is less and less people and land there to become significant.
Secondly, what's your definition of "being a cheat" in football? Let me remind you that kicking Maradona during a match, trying to break his legs so he can no longer play, is cheating. Punching, pushing, hurting someone on purpose is cheating. Even one of the BBC commentators, Emlyn Hughes, said during the England vs Argentina match: "Oh, that was awful. He deserves a red car. Oh well, looks like we got away with it".
Yes, hurting a player on purpose is cheating (England 1986), faking a penalty is cheating (Germany 1990), and scoring a goal with your hand is also cheating (Argentina 1986).
This is why FIFA invented the concept of Fair Play, to stop the English players from hurting others. And also why FIFA invented the VAR, to stop Argentine players from scoring goals with their hand and Germans from faking penalties.
Please, lets stop with the double standards.
But for those of us who did _not_ watch him in the 80s, those of us who didn't necessarily get a kick of him sticking it up the Brits, those of us who grew up in the 90s and 00s and watched him go from one drug-addled binge to the next and then seeing him grift on his career as a "manager"...
Well, there wasn't much glory for that. I understand the astounding emotional effect for those who saw him in the past, but for a lot of us watching from a different point in time there wasn't much that was positive.
Incredible talent, flawed man.
RIP Dieguito. I saw him at least a couple times live at the stadium in the 80s; he was out of this world.
I thought when talking about him that if he showed up in London, there would be a mob around him, but it would be 50% people wanting his signature and selfies, and the other 50% would want to give him a piece of their mind about the Hand of God goal.
He probably wouldn't have been safe in London. As a Man City supporter, I know my estimation of Aguero was dinted a little when I found out he was Maradona's son-in-law.
Why? I remember that handball goal (it was not "the hand of god", it was deliberate handball), as being the moment in my childhood that I realised I could not trust some adults. Some adults - it became clear to me then - were dishonest. Even if they were brilliant, talented and otherwise seemingly worthy of respect, they were capable of cheating and not caring. To a young child (I was approaching my 8th birthday at the time), that was shocking to the core, and I cried, not just at England losing the game but that he - and an entire team, an entire country of adults - had cheated and felt fine with it.
Part of my childhood ended with that goal. I know I'm not alone.
I would have been in the group wanting a selfie though.
To this day you can see representations of him all over the city, he was almost as revered as a local Saint, possibly more.
It's a pity the city is "off" due to COVID19, I would expect some big celebrations.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iglesia_Maradoniana
Poor Maradona holds the record for suffering the most number of fouls in a World Cup – 53, during the 1986 World Cup. He has a tattoo of Che Guevara on his arm, and a portrait of Fidel Castro tattooed on his left leg.-
Controversial figure, certainly to be missed by many ...
He had complete mastery of the ball. When Maradona ran with the ball or dribbled through the defence, he seemed to have the ball tied to his boots.
Discovered at the age of 8, the scouts asked for an ID, thinking they were being had. He played like an adult. Like very few adults, even then.-
Here's someone born with a special gift, of which he gave freely - and, expensively - twice the record holder for the most expensive transfer ever ...
A life well lived. RIP.-
https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1orjm7/scouting_rep...
RIP Diegito
But otherwise using the hand to score a goal in football is not that much different from using a cheat device installed in a race car, taking an illegal shortcut in a marathon, or even performance enhancing drugs. Without drug testing many iconic wins wouldn't have been reviewed and dismissed.
In soccer a non-goalkeeper player never uses the hand to touch the ball. There is no unconscious instinct to go after the ball with your hand. Quite the contrary btw. I just played for hobby and often when something will fall my instinct is to move my feet to ease the fall, not try to catch with my hand.
One is premeditated. The other it’s not. Just like murders.
If the hand of god was gone we'd just talk about the other goal he scored instead
That's why we are here once again remembering the memorable moment that the Hand of God goal was.
The litmus test for somebody’s football beliefs, of this generation at least, was the Luis Suarez handball against Ghana at WC 2010.
Was Suarez justified in volleyball-spiking the shot out of the net? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDpx9GGH79I
When I was younger, I was bitter and thought it wasn’t fair. But I’ve come around. Handballs are part of the game. The punishment in that circumstance is a red card and a multiple game suspension. Most people would have done the same thing in his boots. If you want to remove cheating, you’d have to ban people from the sport. But I think people would prefer to have controversy than to have a synthetically clean game.
(Where I draw the line is tackling with intent to injure, or intentionally escalating physically dangerous situations. That is never OK.)
People are gradually trying to make the game more binary. They tried to make the handball rule more black and white this season, and many players and most fans agree it’s a regression.
"Cheating" would be being on steroids or bribing the ref or something like that.
And Panama's ghost goal keeping USA out of the last World Cup. Ridiculous. I thought they at least had goal line sensors.
Plus, it's just a game, nobody died. And it's fun to watch how a very small player beat a giant keeper through creativity and boldness.
As Sartre said: Il calcio è una metafora della vita. Football is a metaphor of life, it is arduous, hard, difficult, full of suffering with redeeming glory. Miracles are possible, and there is always time.
Interestingly, during my search I found an apt quote for this discussion from another 20th century French philosopher. Camus once said «Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois» ("What I know about morality, I owe to football"). I guess he would be missing the point here too.
For some examples, see the handball rule definition, the definition of when a penalty should be given when a foul occurs near the edge of the box, and the body parts that render an attacking player “offside”. What constitutes a foul vs a fair tackle, especially during set pieces. And, at what point in time should one draw the offside lines?
This year they’ve made enforcement of offsides extremely arbitrary, overturning goals by a distance smaller than the margin of error for the technology. The lines are drawn from players armpits. Armpits are a continuous body feature, and different humans have different dimensions.
In short, two good referees can review an identical event from omnipotent angles, and reasonably come to divergent conclusions.
You surely wouldn't design it deliberately with those flaws and if the flaws were designed on purpose they'd fail at contributing to entertainment, but ripping them out doesn't necessarily make it better.
Just like you wouldn't want to fix US elections in any way at all if their purpose was entertainment. Football's purpose is.
In rugby VAR has been widely adopted for a long time.
I hate that this guy gets lionized. To me it just underlines everything wrong with football.
There's no one who's willing to initiate court proceedings about these matters (it's particularly hard on countries like Cuba), so if the existing public evidence is not enough for you, then nothing will be, so there's no further discussion to be had as it's unlikely any further developments will occur now that he's died.
I'm far from being a connoisseur about football and sports in general though, so I don't exactly know what this guy has done, but this can be applied to any man on this Earth.
And similarly with other Uruguayan football player who apparently is an asshole but I have to give it to him that his football playing abilities are amazing.
It wasn’t just a big match. Just four years after the war in the south Atlantic, it was perhaps the biggest international match in the brief history of international matches.
That's a big assumption. I bet without coke he wouldn't have dared to do his hand of god act.
One needs more than coke to do what he did in 1986. One needs to be extraordinarily gifted, only for the likes of Pele, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Garrincha, Messi, Zico, Cruyff, and Maradona could ever do.
It was more a feeling of revenge than liberation. In 1939 my family and the entire country was at war with an GERMAN dictator, when suddenly WINSTON CHURCHILL, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, instead of de-escalating the situation with the GERMAN dictator decided to go to war with a country that was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, GERMAN people felt betrayed by England.
I hated his guts as a kid because of 1990 (another hand of god, and the feeling he took from Baggio and Schillaci’s Italy a final that was our god-given right), but I’ve come to realize later that he was one of the last great footballers to be (flawed) men first and athletes second. The way he spoke of guilt and regret, his embarrassingly public mistakes... they made him more real than a robotic superman like Cristiano Ronaldo will ever be. And some of his highlight reels are ridiculous.
Really recommend it to anyone interested.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iglesia_Maradoniana
This is a video about it by Vice: https://youtu.be/knRo_1xrJ2A
They perform baptisms and marriages. Members usually use Diego for their children's first or middle names.
They also spell "god" as "d10s" (dios + 10, where 10 is Diego's jersey number).
There are many songs dedicated to him, such as https://youtu.be/EAk-l1VHzBw
...and a museum, I think.
Maradona's immortal play is "el gol del siglo": https://youtu.be/jOz2uGMTA2w
The atmosphere during that match was pretty tense since Argentina and England had an armed conflict 4 years prior, the Falklands War.
The atmosphere in the crowd and the skills without his boots tied up.
Jurgen Klinsmann, who was playing for the home team that day, said a few of his teammates stopped warming up to watch him. I reckon the sight of this crazy little fella just psyched to dance and play ball, off-handedly showing more skills than most players on the planet will ever have, must have sowed quite a few seeds of doubt in Bayern’s players.
https://hernancasciari.com/blog/10_6_segundos
¡Gracias Diego!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_hand_of_God
and watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccNkksrfls
On second thought, this was probably a hack of sorts.
But the parallel with Nero somehow is quite on point. They had, surprisingly, many similarities.
Who wouldn't belong here, either.
My point is that a person can be very famous around the world and still not known by many people. Parochialism doesn't need to be invoked, just math.
I laughed my ass off, because I decided he was the only person in LA County to have asked that question anytime recently. Incidentally, I guarantee you he has no idea who Diego Maradona is.
Crunch also once asked me, 2 days after the election, "Did Obama win?". He was traveling overseas and was "out of the loop". I saved the email and laugh about it to this day.
(If you don't know who Crunch is, and you're using this website, that's funny.)
Why would anyone who doesn't follow one very specific sport have heard of that person? Stop being parochial.
I never have, but I don't follow rugby.
I'm still not sure why everyone assumes everyone else must have heard of this person, and downvotes everyone who hasn't. There's a weird, exclusive, gatekeeping vibe going on here, and it's extremely unwelcoming to people who didn't have a very specific background growing up. My background didn't include whatever sport this person apparently played, so I don't know them, so I'm somehow a bad person? I don't get it.
Where? I've never heard of him.
So yeah, outside your own limited experience Maradona was a huge deal.
Never a big fan myself though yet dep, barrilete cósmico and hugs to all the Argentinian folks, it's difficult to convey why and how much they feel what they do about this flawed individual, but they do.
This is the weird, obsessive, gatekeeping vibe I'm talking about, as if not knowing one specific person from one specific country makes you utterly ignorant.
I don't expect people like you to know about Emmy Noether, even though she was an important figure, and I certainly wouldn't degrade them for not knowing what she accomplished.
There was this concept of general knowledge you used to aspire to which is becoming quickly replaced by the atomization of information among tiny communities which go unaware of each other, this might end up as some postmodern version of the Middle Ages. As I'm old-fashioned I don't think that's a good idea, but folks don't tend to care about general good ideas if they find them personally unpleasant in some way, that's another recent trend.
Oh, I had to become familiar with Emmy Noether BTW, when you do Particle Physics it's hard not to. I can write down the two versions of her most famous theorem we referred to. I think the less useful one was nicely left for you to learn about from a review by Hill from 1951, but I'd have to look it up.
The great thing about having seen grown the Internet when gopher was awe inspiring as a teenager is that you know how to work with books, paper and your memory plus you know all the tricks after having been googling for 22 years. You're also aware of lots of stuff that isn't online yet and where to find it physically. Pretty cool huh? Too bad that's dying.
Do you know anything interesting about say Artin's algebra books now that we've been talking about Emmy? For instance why I'm mentioning Artin? What about that famous Hilbert's actually feminist quip involving Emmy's application? That would have been nice upper level general knowledge for instance, not limited to STEM people.
What information gives that to anyone except the empty personal feelings of someone who needs to post something just because? I see this a lot lately, and it's just frankly boring noise, of the whiny kind.
And then goes with name-dropping and stating that people who can talk about popular culture can't possibly know anything high-brow, which it even isn't in this case (high-brow might be for instance Adorno's book on Mahler to give an example I could barely follow). It's utter ignorance assuming that everyone you're prejudiced against for inane reasons can't possibly be perchance better educated than you are, could you imagine, oh the horror. There are several varieties of utter ignorance at play here IMO.
Wow.
Of course I know Perón. He was a murderous dictator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wVho3I0NtU
The ease with which he played, and lived, was the stuff of legend. There's something tragic in it as well, since it probably contributed to his early passing.
j/k of course
RIP Diego
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccNkksrfls
[0] https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/diego-maradona
Farewell, Diego.
Almost nobody puts Pelé lower than 3. And Cruyff had a huge influence but he's usually top 10 or so.
But it seems football is getting more difficult and more mechanic over time, that is why I consider messi as a glitch
Football is a team game, and that is a lot more true today than three, four decades ago.
Messi in another hand is "professional" since he was 6. He moved to Barcelona at age of 10 to go through an hormonal treatment and since then he is exposed to professional football. Such chance was impossible back in the 50s for a black kid in Brazil or anyone else actually.
Football wouldn't be as polished today had it not been for players like Pele and Maradona. Pele is GOAT and nobody comes even close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5uarbz-jBA
He brought hope and excitement to people who had nothing else going on. Edit:spelling
If players are allowed to play in Europe, fans that are under 35 years should be allowed inside the stadiums. Life must continue, empty stadiums turn fields to graveyards.
The community here on HN has, at its core, a common interest in technology and startups. That then implies that many have an interest in programming and business.
But not all.
So people here do have a wide range of interests, and others will share those non-core interests. Sometimes they strike a chord, sometimes they don't. But that's the way communities work.
There's potentially a lot to discuss about Maradona. The exquisite talent, marred by the personal life and "The Incident" with the "Hand of God", and there are parallels there with programmers who are amazingly skilled, and yet complete jerks to the people they work with.
So there are reasons why this is not entirely out of place.
Finally, if this wasn't an honest question, and you actually believe that the submission does not belong here, then I give you this from the guidelines[0]:
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Argentina is have a three day duel for this guy, portrayed as a hero, with honorific status.
As someone born in Argentina, I can't help feeling disgust and shame on this.
He was definitely a drug addict, a tax cheat, an unfaithful husband, a horrible non-father to his bastard kid, and a pretty poor football coach. He likely had sex with young girls, in his wild years. But 10 or 12 seems a bit too much even for a coked-up sex fiend.
Couldn't agree more.
This is false.
Do you have a link for that? I can't find that in Wikipedia. If is well known he had a lot of affairs and extramarital children, but I don't remember something like this.
Maradona had more charisma and leadership though.
But what makes Maradona the best football player in the world is that he transcended football. His football changed things. Brought pride to both Naples and Argentina more than a football trophy could've.
But it was a different football, comparisons are not really meaningful.
You just have to look at any game from the 2010/11 season to realize that.
Given all of his struggles this is not exactly a bolt of lightening from blue skies, but I'm feeling surprisingly moved by this one.
Maradona is given the nod because he played in Spain and Italy, in addition to Argentina, and dominated a World Cup with a much weaker team.
And I don't see the competitiveness of leagues/or time holding up as an argument.
Pelé dominated his competition for a long time, he won national and continental championships multiple times as well as being the star in two world cups, one of them at the age of 17, his numbers are better as well.
Maradona in the meantime spent a solid amount of time in both Europe and South America and wasn't continental champion, so relatively speaking, he wasn't as dominant in his time as Pelé was during his own.
And if you argue that competitiveness is ever increasing, you have Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo with much better numbers and a decade-long dominance, I would argue even Zidane, Romario and Ronaldo above him in terms of results.
Maradona comes from a time when governments were highlighting football for need of national unity. Pelé was used for media in the same way.
He's definitely one of the greatest when it comes to how symbolic he is to the game, he represents Argentina's rise to the top of the football world, which has followed as Argentina has consistently put great players since, but I have high reservations as to calling him the best of all time.
You are probably right about the other players that you mentioned as well, and given some distance from their remarkable achievements we will absolutely see them in even higher regard than we already do.
That said, "Pelé: Birth of a Legend" is just a terrible movie... but I am trying not to hold that against him.
Maradona is certainly in the conversation for greatest player of all time, but it's a bit weird to suggest that it's a universal opinion.
In any case, Garrincha was better than either.
Maradona played in an era that is more akin to modern football with stricter rules.
Don’t get me wrong. Pele was great, but I doubt he would have been that great in modern football.
This argument has never made any sense to me, in any sport or discipline. If you directly bring a 25-year old Pele or Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky to 2020 using a time machine, they won't measure up to their peers. If you send an average math professor from a mid-tier college back to 1680s England, they'd dazzle Newton. Because standards and the base level of skill have gone up across the board since then.
That doesn't mean average math professors today are smarter than Newton. And it doesn't mean the average professional footballer today is actually better than Pele or any of the other greats of the past. Bring baby Pele (or Jordan or Gretzky) to 2020 and (barring injuries) he'd be a world-beater in 20 years.
Even this specific comment of yours was dead. I had to vouch for it to reply to you.
Somebody/bot is flagging all your comments instantly. email the mods hn@ycombinator.com to ask them to remove this. Seems like none of your comments are against the rules
If we focus on world cup only for example, Pele had the benefit of playing with the best team in the world. Maradona basically won the world cup on his own.
Pele was he even a good soccer player. Nobody knows. He never played in a European club or tournament against and with the world's best players. He choose to spend he entire career playing in the USA. The US, at that time, was not big into soccer. Had no good players or soccer environment. They had a lot of amateurs and showmanship and if you were just a little above the performance and skills on an average European player you could easily run around the corner with the American player and that was what Pele did. There exist no proof that he was particlar good a playing soccer. He might have been but your guess is as good as mine but his marketing skills must have been amazing. He soccer skills probably not so much.
Maradona on the other hand. He was an amazing player. RIP