There could, in many ways, have been no more fitting tribute. A year after the death of Diego Maradona, two of his former clubs have announced plans to face each other for a cup in his honor. The game, between Boca Juniors and Barcelona, will be played in January. It will be staged in Riyadh.
We could probably just leave it there, but to be clear: Maradona spent two seasons at Barcelona, one of them interrupted by injury, and often traced many of the demons that haunted him to his time there. He may be indelibly associated with Boca, and his love for the club is not in question — after retirement, he maintained a private box at the Bombonera — but he enjoyed only a single campaign there in his prime. By the time he returned in 1995, he was a shadow of what he had been.
It is a shame that both of these teams, then, should be trying to lay claim to his legacy. Far more fitting would be a two-legged tie between the teams where he spent the bulk of his career, staged at the stadiums that now bear his name: the home of Argentinos Juniors, where he started his career, and that of Napoli, where he sealed his legend.
The brands of Barcelona and Boca Juniors are much more potent than either of those clubs, of course. They are far more glamorous targets for Saudi cash in that country’s attempts to dress itself up as a sporting powerhouse rather than, you know, a repressive autocracy. But they should not be allowed to contort history to suit their own ends, to weight Maradona’s story in their favor, to erase those places where he wrote the majority of it from the record.
Correspondence
Events, ultimately, have a habit of making fools of us all. Scarcely 48 hours after a finely crafted newsletter appeared in your inboxes, explaining how Manchester United had perfected the art of soccer-as-content, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer let his team lose by 5-0 to Liverpool, raising the possibility that the club might actually do something to get out of its content sweet spot, with the devastating consequence that last week’s column might have seemed wrongheaded.