Article by Narcis Drejan – Published Tuesday, November 25, 2025, 9:59 p.m. / Updated Tuesday, November 25, 2025 10:00 p.m.
Five years without Maradona. Five years in which the world moved forward, but the soul of football remained a moment behind, like a child who is late at the school gate, hoping that maybe the father will come to take him in his arms once more.
So Diego left, not as a mortal, but as a constellation that broke away from the sky of South America and chose to wander through another galaxy.
Because if Borges said that the tango is a return, Maradona was a cosmic flight, a flight to all directions, a living contradiction, a man who burned all the South American libraries in him. In his dribbling there were pages from the “Labyrinth of Babel”, in his gaze there was the sadness of the old colonel who is still waiting for the letter promised by the state, in his anger there was the blood of Aureliano Buendia mixed with the dust of the Argentine roads. Diego was not only a footballer, but a novel character, too big to fit between two covers.
The biblical and embarrassing moment at the funeral
He had the life of a Cortazar hero: absurd, fantastic, sometimes impossible to believe. A chronopius, as Cortazar said, that is, a dreamer with boots, a magician descended from another logic, who made the balloon defy the laws of gravity, as if the ball were a coin that slipped through the fingers of fate.
And then, the sheep. Those South American sheep, lost, storming like a flock of white shadows on the day of his funeral, running past the hearse, filming, singing, howling. It was a grotesque and sublime spectacle, a carnival of pain, a Macondo turned inside out. In their madness, it was as if they were some apocalyptic sheep descended from a Sabato story, animated by the belief that by touching the coffin they were touching a remnant of divinity.
I looked at everything with a mixture of amazement and revolt: those people would not have behaved with more fanaticism even if they had witnessed the burial of Jesus. But in Argentina, death is not solemn, it is theatrical, colossal, a last tango danced by ordinary lives around an extraordinary destiny. There, suffering is not whispered. It is shouted. It is sung. Live with blood until the last drop.
Sung until the end of mankind
And Maradona is there, in their songs, in the unofficial poems of the stands, in Rodrigo's “La mano de Dios”, in Manu Chao's “La vida es una tombola”, in the way Argentina transforms reality into myth, and myth into an object of daily worship. He is a Borges without libraries, a Marquez without Macondo, a Sabato without undergrounds, and yet he is all at once. Because only in South America can a genius live like a novel and die like an epic.
60 years is a long time for a genius, you're right. Geniuses don't age. They erode, break, go out in excess, fall from the sky like meteorites that have burned too intensely. Maradona was a continent in himself, a man who carried in him all the beauty and all the tragedy of Latin America: poverty, brilliance, revolt, poetry, faith, tumult.
5 years without him. But Diego lives the way great characters live: not in life, but in destiny. In every desperately touched ball, in every kid who tries an impossible trick, in every old Argentine who puts his hand over his heart when he hears his name. Maradona has not disappeared. It just moved into another metaphor.
