All language subtitles for What Killed Maradona 2021 (What Killed Maradona 2021) (ENGLISH)

Diego Maradona rose from street
urchin to become a footballing god.

The world's greatest player receives
the world's most important football prize.

But he was never to see out
his later years, dying at just 60.

The cause of death
was given as heart failure.

But what really killed
Diego Maradona?

This film pieces
together the extraordinary

life of a man who's
an addict off the pitch.

Maradona was not just
taking cocaine, but he

was drinking a lot of
alcohol with the cocaine.

He also relied on a
cocktail of pharmaceuticals

to maintain his
world-beating performance.

It was amazing that he could
walk away from the stadium.

This is how Maradona's
lethal lifestyle eventually

became a perfect
prescription for his death.

For those that knew Diego
Maradona, his story is one

of genius and trauma from
the humblest of beginnings.

The streets were not paved with
asphalt, so you could play football.

So my dream came true.

Diego, the young kid who comes through the
shantytown and wants to conquer the world,

through his talent in football and
who keeps going back to that time in the

streets when he played football with
his mates and wants to be that kid forever.

My first dream is to
play in the World Cup.

And the second is to
become the champion.

That's what I want to do.

Somehow I think God, when he was born,
sprinkled a bit of special dust on him.

So there he was with
this immense personality.

But he never forgot that he was
Diego from the slums of Buenos Aires.

And that little Diego was the
person who I became very fond of.

As a young child, Maradona
receives a gift from his uncle.

The gift of a football.

That will change his life.

Diego first got into football thanks
to his uncle Cirilo, who used to be a

frequent visitor to the little shanty
hut where they lived in Villafiorito.

And who gave him
his first ever toy.

Maradona's former trainer, Fernando
Signorini, recalls how obsessed he was

with the simplicity and
peace of his childhood.

He told me that he played 10 hours a
day, many times alone, playing against the

wall, against the fence,
against the pots in the house.

One of the many
people to recognize

Maradona's potential
was a local truck driver.

You have to imagine the scene of an
Argentine truck driver who had a sort of

part-time job advising
the local youth team.

And he sees this group
of kids in this open ground.

And in the middle
he sees this one kid.

And it's little Diego Maradona
doing magic with his left foot.

And he looked at him and said, you
know, this is a sort of gift from God.

This kid is just amazing.

But soon after joining a
local team, the 10-year-old

Maradona experiences
the first of many injuries.

A defender hit him very
badly with the tip caps.

That night, the fever
went up to 40 degrees.

The next morning, at 6 in the morning,
he was taken to a doctor, Dr. Barman.

This was the first
time that they put a

syringe in his knee
and took out black blood.

That was the first
big injury, the first big

setback that Diego
had in his football life.

Maradona recovers and rises through
the juniors team, Los Chabolitas.

He started to form part of that emblematic
club that became famous in Argentina

because he won more than
250, 260 games without losing.

Maradona's early skills
are way beyond his years.

He's a prodigy.

But his poverty-stricken childhood
has left him at a disadvantage.

Maradona's upbringing
was very difficult.

He was quite malnourished
as a young child.

And, of course, a lack of vitamins, a
lack of nutrients and a lack of energy

may well have inhibited his growth
in the early stages of his development.

I think it's very important to understand
what happens then in his early years to

then see how it all transforms
when he becomes an adult.

Maradona begins a course of treatment with
a local doctor to build up his physique.

He understood who Diego was.

And although some gave him a certain
diet in addition to a vitamin supplement to

help him grow, because it was one
of the issues that Diego wasn't so well

developed, we're talking
about the 70s, 71s, and then it

exploded, partly because of the
effectiveness of that treatment.

In the whole area of
drugs, what players would

be given was far less
regulated than it is today.

And in Argentina, it
was very, very chaotic.

Three years later, Diego's
physique was different.

And not to mention what it would be
two years later when he made his debut.

At 15, Maradona signs
with Argentinos Juniors,

the youngest player to
play in the first division.

Diego, from those early years, was
destined to have his encounter with a

whole series of dubious
characters who claimed to be helping

him, who literally didn't have
his best interests at heart.

By the beginning of the
80s, Maradona has made the

journey from a skinny
child to a well-built footballer.

From that moment on, because of the
magic of his left foot, all the things that

happened to him later in
his life fell on top of him.

For a footballer, Maradona
not only looks unusual

at barely 5'5", he's
different on the inside too.

The fact that he was able to be so
obsessive about it and played and

practiced and practiced
and practiced from being

so young would definitely
have shaped his brain.

Our brains are plastic and they
mold to the experiences that we have.

With Maradona, we see a player
who had excellent ball control.

He was renowned as being one of the
best dribblers of a football in the world.

And that motor ability would have
been developed in his youth, in his early

years, when he was
exposed to kicking a ball, to

running with a ball,
to dribbling with a ball.

It would have helped to really fine-tune
that motor ability, fine-tune those neural

pathways to ensure that he
had the ball control and the

skill that he was renowned
for throughout his career.

The young Maradona hard-wires himself
to be in complete control of the ball.

You know, when we're a kid,
we love to be good at something.

Being good at something, as long as
there is positive reinforcement and there's

something that's a reward for him, in
that means that he'll keep trying and

keep expressing the talent that
he has and getting better and better.

As his career progresses,
his income rises, along with

the pressure to support a
growing number of dependents.

He was already the head of the family, a
family that, of course, had already come

out from the shanty town where they were
lived in, and they had bigger apartments,

but they started
to depend on him.

For Maradona,
family is everything.

He starts to provide for the family, which
means that he's got a huge amount of

responsibility, and he knows that he
cannot get injured, that he's got to do

well, that everybody expects him to
become a professional of a higher caliber,

so to pay for
everything, really.

But that responsibility
also has got a price.

He's carrying that weight of
responsibility for not just himself and

his own success, but for his family,
his most loved, from such a tender age.

And I think that that would have meant
he was more relentless, more willing to do

whatever he needed to do,
but also suffering at some level.

In 1981, at the age of 20,
he transfers to the legendary

Argentinian First Division club,
Boca Juniors, for US$4 million.

Maradona's arrival at Boca sees
him achieve national recognition.

It was really sort of the
beginning of his, certainly

his upward curve in the
big business of football.

It was one year before the
World Cup in Spain in 1982, so

his value as a player was being
upped, and it was important.

It was a big contract at that time,
which paved the way for his inclusion in

the World Cup team of Argentina
that goes in 1982 to Spain.

I think that at this moment he is the most
important player in international football.

Maradona makes the move to the
international stage at the 1982 World Cup.

Alongside stars
like Ozzy Ardiles.

And with him,
other stars of 1978.

Mario Kempis, scoring goal one.

Daniel Bertoni, goal two.

And the new idol, Diego
Maradona, making goal three.

It's a dream come true.

The dream at the football level is to win
the World Cup and the 1982 World Cup.

Despite high hopes
for his World Cup debut,

Maradona is sent off in
a brutal game with Brazil.

And Argentina are knocked
out in the second group stage.

Trying to build a team around Maradona
in 1982, it was the old players, or the

veterans that won the 78
World Cup, and the new

ones, and the mixture
didn't really fully work.

Despite Argentina's
defeat, Maradona's ascent

from childhood prodigy
to global star is underway.

As the pressure mounts,
Diego Maradona copes by

thinking of himself as
two separate identities.

We see a lot in superstar
athletes that very

intense psychological
ability to compartmentalize.

And it's almost a
split with Maradona.

He describes it
almost as a split.

Keeping a little piece of Diego Maradona
separate from what everybody else thought

they owned a piece of was
a place for him to retreat to.

But Diego has no idea at this
stage how big Maradona will become.

It does have a dark side.

And managing that success, that fame,
that adulation, you know, is a tough gig

and needs a lot of
support to get that right.

Maradona's incredible skills make him
a target for midfielders and defenders.

Injuries and
increasingly the use of

painkillers are becoming
ever more frequent.

Part of the problem is that there is a
temptation to use painkilling injections

and painkilling prescription
drugs to mask the pain.

The after effects are worse because the
injury has been exacerbated because you've

played at a time when you shouldn't
have played and you've ignored the pain.

As Maradona arrives on the
global stage, drugs seem to

have become well established
in his footballing career.

The issue of infiltration in Diego
was part of his ego, of Maradona.

Since he started in the first division,
he always had collateral needs to play.

In 1982, Maradona is brought by
Barcelona for the record sum of 7.

6 million US dollars.

Joining such an important club
as a star player is a huge honour.

But the move will have a terrible
effect on his body and his mind.

When Diego arrives in Barcelona,
at first he feels incredibly solitary,

very, very alienated,
thousands of miles away from

his home country, the
environment he was used to.

To fight the loneliness,
Maradona brings friends

over from Argentina
to live with him in Spain.

I remember talking to some of the players
and they said it was like being with a

school kid who had been thrown into this
big world in Barcelona and was trying to

come to terms with it and
was totally ill-prepared for it.

Feeling lonely in the
dressing room is just

the start of Maradona's
problems at Barcelona.

His sublime skills mean
he can't be contained,

so opposition teams
resort to taking him out.

This brutal tattle by the so-called
Butcher of Bilbao not only puts Maradona

out of action for over three months, it
will haunt him for the rest of his career.

It did involve, eventually,
him having to take

cortisone injections quite
regularly in his left ankle.

It was difficult to
recover from that.

He never fully did, so the ankle
didn't have the flexibility that he had had

before, but he had, as he
always did, he had to adapt to that.

Despite the injury,
Maradona will play on.

In Diego's life, playing and not
stopping was part of being Maradona.

He was a football player,
but he was Maradona,

and he had to be there,
and he had to give up.

Everything moved in relation
to Maradona as a player.

And in that sense,
Diego had to play, even

though he was physically
ill and had an injury.

After an operation to repair
bone and tendon damage in his

ankle and the use of
painkillers, he returns to the pitch.

You can very quickly
and very easily become

addicted to painkillers
because that's the way out.

That's the only route
that you have to get you

back playing in front of
the fans and the cameras.

But another new drug
has entered his life.

He began taking cocaine when he was in
Barcelona because he thought it was like

drinking Cuba Libres
while in the nightclubs.

The trouble is,
Maradona is a star.

He has a forceful
personality, wealth, powerful

friends, and access to
any substance he wants.

It's impossible
to say no to him.

Diego himself, literally with a click
of his finger, with a phone call there,

with a message there, suddenly
getting what he wanted almost instantly.

Maradona is starting to show signs
of addiction to alcohol and cocaine.

I think it was cocaine
that he used to confront

and confront everything
the world demanded of him.

The one who came from El Fiorito,
who, as he said one day, they kicked me

and they took me to the top of the
mountain, but they left me alone and no

one explained to me how
to survive the invades of

fame, sometimes that
almost bloody persecution.

Illicit drugs and alcohol are
both disinhibitors and numbers.

They numb pain.

So when he was at his lowest and when
he was feeling the most lonely and lost,

that was an easy thing for
him to turn to, to deal with that.

Maradona's journey at
Barcelona has been marked

by loneliness, injury
and increasing drug use.

But an offer from a new
club will see him reach

new heights of glory
and even deeper despair.

In 1984, Napoli is a city on the
edge, ridden with mafia corruption,

poverty-stricken.

The populace has two joys
in their lives, Catholicism

and football, and they're
about to get a new saint.

Diego arrives like the
second coming in a real sense.

All these adoring fans feeling that
the saviour has arrived in their midst.

For Massimo Vignati, whose
father ran the Napoli changing

rooms at San Paolo Stadium,
Maradona becomes a family friend.

Maradona signs to Napoli for another
record sum of around 10 million dollars.

The club are at the bottom of the
league and facing possible relegation.

From the beginning, when 70,000
people were waiting for him to what he was

really, the beginning of a
love story, from that moment

on, he realized that something
special was happening.

The warm welcome at Naples is like gaining
a new family for the lonely Maradona.

But this family numbers in the millions
and will become ever more demanding.

When he arrived, he saw
how people welcomed him

and he immediately fell
in love with the people.

Because then, at a
distance, let's see, he was one

of the people because
he stood against everyone.

He always defended the people.

And even here in Naples
he had a war with the north.

The power of the north.

Despite being fired up by the warmth of
his fans and teammates, Maradona begins

his time at Naples with
a monkey on his back.

Injury.

He is physically having to deal with
the injuries he's already had on his left

ankle, the injections that he has to submit
himself to in terms of going on playing.

Now, more than ever, Maradona is
relying on pain relief to keep him playing.

Cortisone injections.

Don't forget, we were in a time when
people were administering cortisone

injections to players to get
them back on the field again.

It was, OK, you got a pain, we'll
give you a jab, you play next week.

I suspect he was given
cortisone systemically

through the vein where
the cortisone is not present.

It's not just affecting the joint, it's
having its effects all over the body

and these can be terrible
for things like the heart.

Initiatized against the pain, Maradona
feeds off the love of the people of Naples

and inspires his team to rise
up through the Italian Serie A.

At first he said, I'll
show you how it's done.

And he was the
happiest man in the world.

I mean, the
number is incredible.

For me, our Lord told him,
you are my disciple of prison.

On the pitch, he
was just superb.

It was a strong team and
he was, he was floating.

He was just, you
know, he was in the flow.

He was completely at
the best version possible.

Physically, he was sharp.

Psychologically, he was strong.

The hero worship from the Neapolitans
reaches new levels of intensity.

Encouraged by Maradona's
deep-seated need for adulation.

I think he loved being popular.

He loved to display his talents.

He loved the, he loved the love.

Obviously it was difficult
at times and very intrusive.

He was Diego.

He loved being loved
and he loved to give love.

He went to the end of the world, but
with Maradona he didn't take a step.

Because he was unbearable.

He couldn't go to dinner because
people would throw themselves at him.

He would put his hand on the
plate to ask for an autograph.

He would throw
his hair to run away.

Well, he answered me
that yes, he was right.

But, if it weren't for Maradona,
I would still be in Fiorito, right?

But too much love
can be a bad thing.

The hero worship is so relentless,
it places new stresses on Maradona.

He had to be a god.

He had to be an immortal.

He wasn't allowed to be ordinary anymore
because that would have been disappointing.

And the cost of that, I think,

psychologically is
dramatic for a young man.

When he is off the pitch, Maradona blows
off steam with increasingly risky behavior.

Diego was attending parties at which senior
figures of the local mafia were the hosts.

Definitely, Diego, in terms of his cocaine
use, was getting into serious abuse.

And his nightlife was
becoming legendary.

The Camorra, the powerful Neapolitan
mafia clan which holds sway over the city,

cultivate the relationship
with Maradona.

It was easy to
get, to get cocaine.

The Camorra was very close
to him, invited him to parties.

He loved that
kind of lifestyle, a

lifestyle of, of everything
you can imagine.

Parties that lasted a long time.

He's a, he's a charmer.

Everybody wanted
to be around him.

He was, he was a god in earth.

Maradona develops a coping strategy
to maintain his form on the pitch,

despite growing cocaine
and alcohol consumption.

So there'd be party days
in, in Naples after a game.

But those days ended on
the day that Diego said, right,

match date, four days time,
however many days it was.

That's it, focused.

And this body just got
back into shape again.

But he's doing long-term
damage to his body.

Maradona was not just
taking cocaine, but he

was drinking a lot of
alcohol with the cocaine.

One of the issues with cocaine and alcohol
is it results in a metabolite called

cocaethylene, which is much,
much more potent than cocaine.

It also means that the effects of
cocaine linger on for much, much longer.

And it is much more detrimental to the
heart and liver compared to cocaine alone.

Both drugs damage the heart,
but the combination is really lethal.

Diego Maradona's time
in Italy, in Naples, is,

I would say, a defining
chapter in his life.

It is also a period where the downward
spiral descent on the personal front

begins, not just his abuse of drugs, but
the disintegration of his personal life.

So he was asphyxiating
atmosphere.

He was injections because
he had pain everywhere.

He was fans that wanted more,
like Amorra that was next to him.

Him abandoning himself
because he needed to disappear

from that world and come
back to it to keep playing.

That's the world
that he had in Napoli.

As if things can become more
extreme, the most loved player

in the world is about to
become one of the most hated.

Maradona is selected to be team captain for
Argentina at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.

He's confident that he can
lead Argentina to victory.

He had the talent that
he so believed in and so

believed was unique
and also he wanted to win.

Historically, France and West
Germany always do well, but

I think Argentina and England
are very strong this year.

Knowing his vulnerability
to injuries, his opponents

fouled him 53 times
throughout the tournament.

Diego played at a time when
they kicked nonsense out of him.

They kicked every
part of his body.

They jumped on him.

They elbowed him.

And the referees just
allowed it to happen.

They wanted to break him.

Maradona would finish a game having
received far more tackles, been fouled far

more regularly and inevitably
those challenges, that literally

being a marked man, meant
that he suffered more injuries.

In the run-up to the last
World Cup, Argentina

and England were at
war over the Falklands.

Now, as they face their nemesis,
the eyes of the world are on Maradona.

Diego Maradona single-handedly
dominates the tournament.

Everyone talked about him because
he was at the height of his game.

Maradona's hand-of-God goal is
allowed and takes Argentina to 1-0.

It was revenge for that humiliation in
this war against the imperialist English.

It's followed by the
goal of the century.

Certainly his second
goal will go down as one

of the best goals ever
in a World Cup Finals.

Maradona achieves
his childhood dream.

Barely a year later,
Giuseppe Bruscolotti plays

alongside Maradona as
Napoli win the Italian Serie A.

When you win it's against
Juve first then the Milanese.

For the Neapolitans
it's the greatest joy.

We've all touched the sky there.

Now, normality for
Maradona is a distant memory.

Whenever he drove through Naples people
used to jump on a car if they stopped at

traffic lights and jump on the
bonnet and try and just touch him.

He was like a god.

You know, I have a desire
to walk for Naples freely.

I don't think he could walk because the
way he was loved he couldn't even walk.

The Neapolitans the way he was in
love with that man just touch him and say I

don't wash my hands anymore
because I touched Maradona.

The problem is when he
put his foot on the street

he transformed because
Napoli was truly aficionado.

It was impossible for him
to control that environment.

It wasn't even that Diego wanted to
show off or wanted to be the center of

attention although he
enjoyed that obviously.

In a way it was
because he was too nice.

He couldn't say no to
people who he liked.

So they just came
along for the ride.

The intense adulation in
Naples is becoming too much.

As Maradona parties in the clubs
he looks like a man seeking oblivion.

That idea of escape of numbing of becoming
something else for a moment to be free

from the pain of being
you whether that's physical

or emotional for a few
hours is very compelling.

He already was taking a
huge amount of cocaine.

Now in his late 20s with spiraling
addiction and persistent injuries staying

in shape for the pitch
takes increasing effort.

Physically he was
struggling either a toe or his

back or the ankle there
was always a problem.

Maradona was on a cycle of injury getting
thrown back into training and into playing

at a high level and then
suffering from further injuries.

He took huge punishment it was amazing
that he sometimes having run and been

kicked around the pitch for 90 minutes
that he could walk away from the stadium.

Maradona was required to
perform week in week out.

I don't think he
had much time off.

So you can imagine a 90 minute
game of football and intensive training is

associated with musculoskeletal
injury and pain that he had to run through.

World Cup Italia 1990
The 29 year old Maradona

is once again proudly
representing Argentina.

It was a very very
difficult tournament.

He was playing for an Italian club but
representing Argentina and he's about to

discover that great love can turn on
a dime and become intense hatred.

Argentina knock Italy out of
the World Cup on the home turf.

And it's all over.

The host nation's dream.

It's been an extremely difficult
time for him of split loyalties.

He had so much love from both
places and so much love for both places.

What that tournament
did was begin to see the

beginning of the end
of Diego's time in Italy.

Maradona's enormous Italian fan
base lash out at their former hero.

For a man who thrives on
adulation it's deeply traumatic.

Then you remember in Rome the scene
there the whiskey I printed that image here

because it was the most
sad moment of his life.

After that Italy decided
to give up on him.

Quite clearly he became too noisy
too high maintenance for the club.

That's a form of psychological
rejection and trauma

that doesn't always
make sense to the person.

Maradona begins to accept that his
drug and alcohol abuse is a major problem.

Sadly he got into substances which
made it nearly impossible to recover from.

If he went beyond that line in the sand
it was going to become irrecoverable.

In an interview certainly Maradona
admitted that he was addicted to cocaine

and it was probably
something that was going

to stay with him for
the rest of his life.

Where was he going
to go from Napoli?

There was nothing
left for him to achieve.

Drugs were the only place I'm not
suggesting it's where people do that.

In March 1991 Maradona's
glory days in Italy

end in the ugliest and
most public of ways.

A drugs test reveals
cocaine in his system.

Undoubted he had been
taking cocaine but he insisted

that he hadn't taken it to
enhance his performance.

Maradona is banned from
playing for Napoli for 15 months.

The man who achieved his childhood dreams
is now watching them turn into a nightmare.

Rejected by Naples
Maradona plays for a short

spell in Spain before
returning to Buenos Aires.

He told me and he's always
said that addiction is an illness.

Very much so.

You cannot treat somebody that's ill
the way that football has treated him.

Football show actually
looked after the ones that

have got addiction
and the ones that are ill.

Back in Argentina there is still great
love for Maradona and in 1994 he's thrown

a lifeline to lead his country
the World Cup in America.

By the time he gets to

the World Cup reasonably fit
by the national squad and the

national doctors and by
FIFA to play in the tournament.

Maradona somehow overcomes his demons
and goes to work on getting match fit.

He prepared the
World Cup very well.

He made an effort beyond what
the coach is asking him to do.

To lose weight to get sharp
and to have enough stamina.

And then the effort he was going to
make among other things also had to do with

leaving cocaine in Buenos Aires
and not taking a single milligram.

The 33-year-old Maradona is
a revelation at his first match.

His speed and accuracy on the pitch
seemed to be that of a younger man.

But then comes a
crazed and telling moment.

Diego scores a goal.

He goes rushing over to
the cameras and screams.

And the picture that
goes viral around the world

is of this sort of almost
demonic look of Diego.

And everyone is saying
uh-uh, what's he taking?

At the following match against
Nigeria, Maradona is given a doping test.

He tests positive for five
different types of ephedrine.

The drug and performance enhancer
has long been banned by FIFA.

Maradona had five different types in
his bloodstream and these included

pseudo-ephedrine, non-pseudo-ephedrine,
met-ephedrine and phenyl propanolamine.

So five different types
suggesting that they weren't

something that were given
just for medicinal reasons.

Ephedrine and its variants cause the
metabolism of the body to work at a much

faster level so you feel more
alert, heart rate increases and so on.

There may well be a
temptation to take a drug

such as ephedrine to
offset the impact of alcohol.

Some of these agents also
make you feel very, very happy

and euphoric and they
also suppress your appetites.

The heart really
does work very hard.

It's beating vigorously, the
blood pressure is very, very high.

So apart from giving someone a high,
it's causing a massive load on the heart.

When the news came it was incomprehensible
because the effort was brutal,

brutal, brutal that I had made.

The inevitable news arrived
soon after the positive test.

Maradona is banned
by FIFA for 15 months.

Diego Maradona remains
suspended from all footballing activity.

Despite the shame, his
deteriorating health and

lifestyle, he's desperate
to stay in the game.

And rejoins his old
club, Boca, in 1995.

He returned to the Bombonera, received
as a returning hero, although evidently

overweight, not looking
like a player that was

going to be able to
keep fit in every game.

He didn't sleep well, so he
took a lot of sleeping pills.

And they don't mix
well with alcohol.

Decades of brutality on the pitch,
combined with his excessive lifestyle,

have finally caught
up with Maradona.

And it shows.

Certainly the last 20 years of his life
was a series of reaching a down in terms

of his addiction, then trying
to come back into football.

Finally, at an emotional game in 1997,
arguably the greatest footballer who ever

lived admits that his
playing days are over.

But now, he has to
face life without football.

His losing football
was everything for him.

To take the football away
from Diego left him naked.

With his playing career behind him,
Maradona's health is on a downward spiral.

The long-term injury problems, the
arthritis that Maradona suffered from

after his career will have been as
a result of the knocks, the tackles,

the twists, the turns, and the very
physical demands that regular training and

a high number of matches
have had on his body.

Maradona tips into
full-blown alcoholism.

What do I do now?

I've done everything,
isn't that great?

I'll go and have a drink.

Why?

Because you want to get into another
little place, out of your head space.

Alcohol has a long-term
damage on the body, it

damages the liver, it
causes weight to increase.

In the very latest years of his life, you
know, he's turned to alcohol when he

didn't have discipline
or routine or rigor.

And in the long-term, alcohol
is devastating to the body.

But he, many times, let himself go to
enthusiasm, even if he was with friends,

he didn't hold back.

The big wake-up call
arrives in the year 2000.

Maradona has his
first heart attack.

It's a very sad story.

It was all self-destruct,
it was all downhill.

The heart attack is the
result of a cocaine overdose.

He flees to Cuba for rehab with
the support of his friend Fidel Castro.

Now in his forties, Maradona
tries to save himself.

Maradona went to Cuba to
rehabilitate and kick this cocaine habit.

That would have been very, very difficult
for someone who had been using it for so

many years because stopping cocaine
causes agitation, apathy, lack of energy.

You've then got the
issue of eating excessively.

Maradona enters a vicious cycle of
rehab, relapse and ballooning weight.

In 2004 he has another
heart attack and this time

he can't be blamed on a
single cocaine overdose.

Maradona survives and
undergoes gastric bypass

surgery to relieve the
strain of obesity on his heart.

But this procedure
has its downsides.

Now we're talking about
a chap like Maradona

who had used cocaine
for over 22 years.

This prolonged increase in heart rate for
a long, long time in his life would have

resulted in his heart becoming very weak
and in those sorts of people the loss of

nutrition that goes hand in
hand with bariatric surgery

may have accelerated
his heart failure and death.

Despite the surgery
Maradona's weight still

fluctuates wildly but
he's desperate to get back

He came back as a manager
of a Mexican team, he

came back as a manager
of a Middle Eastern team.

But a player with the genius of Maradona
doesn't necessarily make the best manager.

You know, he became a manager,
all that is just part of the end,

of an end that was stretched because
he just couldn't live without the ball.

Once he reaches his 50s
his hopes of a different life

in football are continually
smashed by ill health.

His lifestyle and his habits were
almost certainly a contributing factor.

A man who'd had heart attacks,
who was known to have other heart

problems, who was taking
agents that were contributing to this.

His drug addiction and
binge drinking, his binge

eating was sad,
terrible, tragic to behold.

In November 2020,
Maradona has emergency

surgery to remove a
blood clot in his brain.

I think the anaesthetists
would have had major concerns

about his risk during
that perioperative period.

So getting him through the
operation, so he would have been

a very high risk individual
for any form of major surgery.

His fans are hopeful that their idol will
recover, as he always has done before.

And his spokespeople
feed them the right lines.

Tragically, just days later,
Maradona's heart finally gives up.

On the 25th of November 2020, he's
found dead at home in Buenos Aires.

One of the greatest footballers that
ever lived died at just 60 years old.

The cause of death was heart failure,
and there is no doubt in my mind that

these cardiac problems
were due to the

cocaine and alcohol
habit that he had formed.

They definitely contributed to his
morbidity and eventually his death.

We know that athletes
generally live around

seven years longer than
the general population.

So someone like him who
had been extremely athletic

to die in his early sixties
is a very premature death.

A preliminary autopsy,
widely reported by Argentine

media, reveals pulmonary
oedema caused by heart failure.

But the lifetime of
pressure, addiction and

abuse of his body have
all helped lead him there.

But I was waiting.

Yes, I was almost sure that...

I even told a friend.

It's in the end.

No, no, no, I didn't
think it would be that fast.

Having lived a life impossible
to live for a human being.

I wanted to do more than the human
condition and the human finitude.

Diego is going to
be like what he was.

A kid who played the
ball and was the best of all.

If Diego Maradona
had born into a different

time, he would have
been treated differently.

He would not have
suffered so much.

He would have
been better advised.

And he would have
not only survived,