ISSUE I
DECEMBER 2024
DECEMBER 2024
Accidental Theorist: Diego Maradona
This series, not to be taken literally, introduces figures from outside academia whose actions and ideas may qualify
them as international affairs theorists
them as international affairs theorists
By Sean Jacobs
Eduardo Galeano, the renowned Uruguayan writer, once remarked that Diego Maradona’s critics singled him out for his so-called arrogance and tantrums, but that their real issue was his political statements and not his behavior. Maradona's legacy as the greatest footballer of all time was cemented with his second and solo-run goal in the 1986 World Cup quarterfinals on the way to Argentina’s second world championship. Watching live from apartheid South Africa, I heard the bitter English commentator call him a “little eel” and “squat man.” Later, I learned, via YouTube, how the iconic Uruguayan TV commentator Víctor Hugo Morales celebrated more appropriately: “What planet are you from?” Maradona then led Napoli – from Italy’s poor, marginalized south – to its first Serie A title and then an unfancied Argentina back to the 1990 World Cup final. Though he had always been a Peronist in his native Argentina (in the way he identified with how to undue class oppression through state means), after his retirement, he became politically more outspoken, making him an accidental international relations and affairs theorist and, appropriately, the first subject in our series.
What would a Maradona theory of international affairs look like?
The closest he came to governing anything political and implementing his ideas about the world was when Venezuela proposed – a nonstarter – that he lead FIFA. In academia, efforts have been made to constitute “Maradonian Studies.”
Maradona, who died in 2020, saw the world as divided between powerful elites (the IMF and the World Bank, the US, soccer federation FIFA) and the marginalized (the Global South, Latin America). In Emil Kusturica’s 2005 film about Maradona’s life, we see him at the front of resistance to US-backed free trade alongside Latin America’s leftist leaders (Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales especially), advocating for economic independence. Months before his death, he promoted a wealth tax in Argentina.
But he sometimes flirted with right-wing populism and authoritarianism to, in his view, achieve equality and freedom for the poor. Pablo Brescia and Mariano Paz, associated with Maradonian Studies, have concluded that it “is impossible to locate Maradona within fixed political coordinates. He is elusive in the political field as he was on the pitch.” They cite sociologist Sergio Lewinsky, who wrote a book about Maradona as a “rebel” figure and who argued that Maradona equuated political coherence with “bourgeois expectation,” which he actively resisted.
His prescription was to disrupt the global status quo via a mix of nationalism, global solidarity, and unconventional resistance. His “Hand of God” goal was an example of the last kind. Mariano Siskind, a Harvard literature professor, once captured that goal’s dual impacts: “There are two interpretations of that goal that break along geopolitical lines: The typical U.S., British moralistic view said that was cheating, but across Latin America, Africa, and the Third World, they view it as a form of humiliating a former colonial power and the ultimate expression of cunning or shrewdness, which is central to a ludic conception of the game (and of life) that stands outside of the realm of morality.”
Sean Jacobs is a professor and director of the Graduate Program in International affairs at The New School.