Diego arrived in Naples 40 years ago, and the first thing he did was call Claudia Villafañe.
He wasn’t talking about contracts or numbers. His legs were shaking, literally, and he told her just like that, without a filter: “They’re a Serie B team, they’ve just avoided relegation by one point, and they welcomed me believing we can be champions”. An entire city was waiting for him at the airport as if he had already won something, when Napoli had barely escaped the hell of Italy’s second division.
That excessive faith, absurd for any other player, became the fuel for one of the greatest stories in football. Maradona ended up giving Naples two Scudetti that no one had imagined possible, and that phrase to Claudia remained as the exact portrait of the moment just before everything changed forever.
