Diego Maradona, all 1.65 metres of him, played with the joy of the individual beating the system. The most charismatic and unprofessional of the great footballers, he was also the only one to win a World Cup almost single-handed, with a second-rate Argentine team in Mexico in 1986.
Born in 1960, he grew up outside Buenos Aires in a shack without running water where pictures of Juan and Eva Perón adorned the walls. He shared a room with seven siblings and once survived a fall into an open cesspit. A pair of turquoise corduroys were his only trousers.
When he emerged in adolescence, Argentine football fans instantly recognised him as the ideal they had carried in their heads since the 1920s: the pibe (boy) nurtured on the potrero (bumpy urban plot) who dribbled with the creativity that supposedly sprouted from a child’s imagination.