Diego Maradona has died
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Original footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wVho3I0NtU
An interview many years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOz2uGMTA2w
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.
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 that soccer was invented in China, not in England. [0]
[0]: https://www.athleticscholarships.net/history-of-soccer-footb...
Arguably Scotland but we're used to England stealing our inventions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_Game#Queens_Park_F...
> 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.
It seems the intersection of football and politics makes for outstanding games. Cometh the hour, cometh the man
- 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?
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".
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!
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...
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 ...
Peter Shilton's Handball Maradona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Shilton's_Handball_Marad...
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.
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.
[1]See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braveheart for background.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
In rugby VAR has been widely adopted for a long time.
If the hand of god was gone we'd just talk about the other goal he scored instead
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.
That's why we are here once again remembering the memorable moment that the Hand of God goal was.
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.
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.
And Panama's ghost goal keeping USA out of the last World Cup. Ridiculous. I thought they at least had goal line sensors.
"Cheating" would be being on steroids or bribing the ref or something like that.
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 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.
I hate that this guy gets lionized. To me it just underlines everything wrong with football.
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.
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.
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.
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.
¡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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Maradona had more charisma and leadership though.
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.
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.
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