For some football fans, particularly those in Argentina, Diego Maradona is the greatest footballer of all time.

Maradona was born in 1960 in a poor area of the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aries, and started playing football in the street as a small boy. By the age of twelve he was working as a ball boy at the stadium of Argentinos Juniors, one of the Buenos Aires teams, entertaining the crowd with his ball-juggling during half time. He played his first game for the Argentinos Juniors first team just before his sixteenth birthday and stayed with the club until 1981, when he joined a more famous Buenos Aires team, Boca Juniors. By this time, though still only twenty-one, he was already the most important player in the Argentina national team. In 1982 he moved to Europe, played in Barcelona for two years and then went to Italy to join Napoli. He soon became a hero with the Napoli fans and was the main reason the team became national champions in 1987 and 1990.

It was as captain of Argentina during the 1986 World Cup finals in Mexico, however, that the most famous moments in Maradona’s career took place. Argentina won the competition and Maradona played brilliantly in most of their games. In the quarter-final against England, which Argentina won 2-1, Maradona scored a goal by punching the ball into the goal (players cannot use their hands in football, of course, but somehow the referee didn’t see it). Then, less than five minutes later, he ran with the ball for sixty metres, past five England players, to score what many people think is one of the best goals in the history of football. English fans said the first goal made Maradona a cheat, but most of them agreed the second showed he was also a genius.

After Maradona stopped playing in 1997 he had lots of health problems. There were times when he was very overweight, and in 2004 he had a heart attack and almost died. Since then, however, life for Maradona has improved. In 2005 he became the host of a chat show on Argentinian TV called ‘The Night of 10’, because that was the number of the shirt he always wore as a player in October 2008, he became the coach of the Argentina national team. History shows that great players do not always make great coaches, but the football world is watching to see how he does.