Jürgen Klinsmann traveled to Buenos Aires and walked through La Boca before fully understanding Diego Maradona.
He saw blue and yellow houses every two blocks, and Diego’s face painted on the third. A poor, proud neighborhood that held itself together through the identity of its colors.
There he understood why Maradona had chosen Naples without hesitation: “This is Napoli, but in a different way”. And when Diego arrived in Italy, he said: “This is my place, this is where I come from”.
When Diego gave them the first Scudetto in history, Naples stopped seeing him as a footballer and began worshiping him like a god. But that love came at an enormous price.
He couldn’t walk through the hallway of his building without running into 100 people waiting for him, or sit in a bar and have an espresso like any other Neapolitan.
Klinsmann sums it up with a line that hits hard: “He belonged entirely to them, and that ended up devouring him. And then the drugs came”.