Maradona - the man who would be king

Identifying your favourite footballer has a lot to do with the age you are when you first see them; a bit like deciding on who is your favourite James Bond. I was thirteen when I saw Pele in his pomp at the 1970 World Cup; he was and remains majestic. I was entranced. I was similarly entranced when I saw Johann Cruyff pull off his trademark turn for the first time against Sweden in the 1974 World Cup. Maradona on the other hand left me a bit cold.

For many Maradona is the greatest of all time, or GOAT as we must now call them, but for me he comes a distant third behind Pele and Cruyff. I appreciate his skill, he was capable of sublime execution and vision, but there was just something about his play. There was a sense of drive and desperation which did not compare with the elegance and innateness of Pele and Cruyff. I never got the sense of joy from his play that I did with the others; even when he was celebrating it seemed more like catharsis.

It is this sense which is superbly investigated in Asif Kapadia’s latest film Diego Maradona. Although Maradona is still alive, unlike his other subjects, the film does round out a trilogy with Senna (2010) and Amy (2015) which is an anthem for doomed youth. Drawing exclusively on archive footage Kapadia paints an illuminating but frankly rather sad picture of Maradona during his years at Napoli, from 1984 to 1991.

This was a time when he made them one of the best teams in Europe but there was a price to be paid. Maradona may have gained the whole world but there is little doubt that Kapadia is suggesting it cost him his soul.

He has taken some 500 hours of archive footage and distilled it down to a gripping two-hour narrative of triumph and disaster. There are no talking head sequences, instead there are only archive audio clips interspersed with some contemporary audio interviews including with Maradona himself. The result is absorbing.

The key to the film for me lies in its title. Although he was normally referred to as Maradona, the film eschews the mononym; the title is Diego Maradona and this is important. Kapadia’s thesis is that there is a Jekyll and Hyde theme at play here. The superstar’s personal  trainer Fernando Signorini explains it very well.

For Signorini, who knew him better than most, there were two distinct people; Diego, who was innocent and likable and Maradona who was crafty and devious. According to Signorini you would do anything for Diego, but you wouldn’t give Maradona the time of day.

Through clever use of archive footage Kapadia gives the sense of these two characters vying for supremacy. In the early scenes in Naples he is young, enthusiastic, and a little overawed. However as the film goes on we can see in his eyes the sense of trepidation and anxiety; a sense that he is being trapped in a world he cannot quite control.

This after all is the quandary of Maradona. On the field he was master of all he surveyed; off the field he was a puppet increasingly in the thrall of some pretty shady characters. In the end he is the victim of his own hubris and, perhaps like Maradona himself, we are left to ponder what might have been.