In 1986, Diego Maradona scored a goal with the hand of God, a few days later he led Argentina to the title of world champion.
Thirty-six years from God's hand, the most valuable and beautiful sports trophy ended up in God's hands, the hands of Leo Messi.
It might be a bit pretentious, but not if you ask the Argentinians - for them, Maradona and Messi are deities.
Diego acquired that status a long time ago, cemented it with an untimely death, Leo did it on Sunday, December 18, 2022.
And while in Argentina, that football-crazed country, the two will be on the same "divine" level and their names will forever be next to each other, the rest of the world will be arguing about who is the greatest or best of all time.
But, can the talent of Maradona and Messi, their influence on the game and on the teams they played in, as well as the status they had off the field, be compared at all.
Difficult...
First of all, Maradona was a talent never seen before, but he played in a different time than Messi. Two perhaps the most banal examples - when he was playing, the goalkeeper could, for example, catch the ball returned to him by a player, and the goal he gave to England today would have been canceled by VAR.
More than three decades ago, Maradona was a far less well-known football player - the world got to know him better because of the technological revolution, with the advent of the Internet, in the "Youtube era".
Watching Maradona and analyzing him and enjoying him for 90 minutes was a privilege in the 80s and until the mid-90s of the last century, watching the Messiah can literally be a daily "ritual".
Maradona was, one might say, a semi-mythical footballer, so his status at that time was also like that. Messi seems to be "present" every day in our lives...
It is also ungrateful to compare someone's extraordinary talent, because these two are not only footballers and athletes - they are also artists in a way, or as Guardiola once said about Messi, and he could have also said about Maradona:
"Don't write about it, don't try to describe it, just look at it".
Can't the same be said for the masterpieces of Picasso and Van Gogh, the music of Beethoven, Mozart... Look and listen, breathless.
Maradona and Messi - magic in their feet.
Maradona and Messi cannot be compared even in terms of lifestyle.
Maradona was both an angel and a demon at the same time. The man who brought indescribable joy was destroying himself at the same time. He socialized with people from the underground, perhaps he was forced to do so, but he also enjoyed the dark world of drugs, alcohol, debauched parties... He ended his serious career in a brutal way, by being expelled from the World Championship in 1994 due to doping (cocaine ). He was expelled, officially for tax evasion, and from Italy, where he came as king, and which he left alone and abandoned by everyone, except his Neapolitans...
Maradona caused both political and social controversies. While he was playing in Naples, he publicly fought against discrimination against southern Italians, called on the Neapolitans to cheer for Argentina in the 1990 World Cup semi-finals, cursed the Italians who whistled his country's national anthem in the final in Milan that year... He was friends with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez ...
Can anyone imagine social networks and today's media if all Maradona's sins, just like his football spells, were available to everyone. And what his life would look like in this time.
Messi, on the other hand, is a family man, tied to Antonella, his love from Rosario, the city he left at the age of 13, while he stayed away even during the turbulent political period during the referendum for the independence of Catalonia...
Diego Maradona and Leo Messi. So similar, yet so different. And unique...
Bonus video:
