Maradona's life deserved a series

We thought we had seen everything about Maradona, who disappeared at the age of 60 on October 30, 2021. His genius goals, his escapades, and the many documentaries devoted to him, and even a Netflix series on his life as a passionate trainer, but at end of the day, from a small Mexican team. But the fiction had never approached the sacred and fallen monster of football. For the first anniversary of his death, Amazon Prime Video has just put online “Maradona: The Blessed Dream”, a series in 10 episodes, the first 5 of which have been available since last Friday. For the next ones, we will have to savor them one by one each coming Friday. We have not yet seen the crazy Neapolitan years, the relationship with the Mafia and the impossible retirement, from wandering to wandering.

But the beginning of this good quality Argentinian fiction, which uses three, even four actors, to play Maradona, from infancy to his last years, even if it warns from the credits to be partly fictionalized, has the great merit of filling an archive void.

Villa Fiorito and its slums?

We have seen photos, but not this interlacing of barely habitable little houses, all made of tin, where "Pelusita" (the bushy) - his first nickname - grew up juggling lemons or other fruits.

Football like a circus, already.

The ball to stand out from its more than humble, abandoned condition.

Carried away by a torrent of excess

Spotted very young, Diego becomes an attraction. The series tells of incredible chaos: from his teenage years, the golden kid, "El Pibe de Oro", is dissected, jealous, carried away by a torrent of excess. He is already being infiltrated to play, and if the player selected for the Argentina team from the age of 16 has already met his future wife, Claudia Villafane, he almost immediately discovers other temptations. The addiction to easy sex comes with its very first successes, and the drug will not be long in the Barcelona years.

So before the explosion in Naples, in every sense of the word: its greatest victories and its downfall.

Maradona is also a fetish of the Argentine dictatorship who seeks to use it, even though he comes from a popular background loyal to his father's Republican Peronism.

This will explain his admiration for Che Guevara - and his tattoo - and his political positions.

The credits at the end of the episode are fabulous, because they are full of archival footage: with Maradona, fiction will never catch up with reality.

EDITOR'S RATING: 3.5 / 5

“Maradona: The Blessed Dream”

, Argentinian series by Alejandro Aimetta, in 10 one-hour episodes, with Nazareno Casero, Nicolas Goldschmidt, Juan Palomino… On Amazon Prime Video.