Angels with Dirty Faces by Jonathan Wilson

Author:Jonathan Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568585529
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2016-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

The president of Argentinos Juniors at the time was Prospero Consoli, an official tailor to the Argentinian armed forces with the rank of corporal. He appointed as chairman of the club General Guillermo Suárez Mason, who was on the board of both YPF, the state oil company, and Austral, the state airline. It’s indicative of how soccer was still seen as an essential component of political life that Mason would happily use his YPF helicopter for soccer business. He also shifted $250,000 from Austral to Argentinos Juniors to help keep Maradona at the club, making him pose in an Austral T-shirt and cap to justify the deal, an early sign of how Maradona’s talent—and Cyterszpiler’s clever exploitation of it—meant he was becoming too big for Argentinos. The use of what were effectively state funds to subsidize soccer was attacked by the popular daily Crónica, but it was a practice that was well established, going back to the cheap loans to fund stadiums in the late thirties and forties. Maradona dutifully made projunta statements about soccer players being soldiers fighting for their nation by other means.

Argentinos just about got their money’s worth. They finished joint second in their group in the 1979 Metropolitano, but lost a playoff with Vélez Sarsfield for semifinal qualification, a game Maradona missed through suspension because of a red card he’d received in a friendly. “A referee took a dislike to me,” he said. Nothing could ever be his fault, a theme that would recur throughout his life. It’s hard not to wonder whether he might have had rather more of a sense of personal responsibility if he hadn’t been indulged so readily for so long. But then messiahs—and Maradona was cast as one long before the Church of Maradona was founded on his thirty-eighth birthday in 19984—perhaps don’t have the same moral code as mortals.

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