Matthew Brown
Maradona’s complicated legacy Why the English can’t let go of the Hand of God and why Latin Americans love it Photo: Wikimedia
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he death of the greatest player in the history of the game of football, Diego Armando Maradona, on November 25 produced an outpouring of grief and nostalgia around the world. He was such an important figure in his native Argentina that the president declared three days of mourning. In England, though many have praised his skill and achievements, his death has provided the opportunity to dig up the Hand of God goal at the 1986 World Cup, which involved Maradona’s fist knocking the ball into England’s goal. For some, even in death, Maradona was still the cheat who could not be forgiven. Yet, it was precisely his refusal to recognise the presumed superiority of the Englishmen flailing before him that gave joy to millions worldwide. The inability of a few in England to move on from that goal speaks to the historical processes that underpin Britain’s relationship with Latin America, which in my research I have characterised as a combination of “culture, capital and commerce that formed an in-
CHEAT: The moment of the Hand of God goal against England in 1986.
formal empire” from the mid-19th to the early 20th-century. The problem is that “football was created in England, but perfected in South America”, as the historian Brenda Elsey has written. We saw this when Peru’s Teófilo Cubillas punctured Scottish
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dreams in 1978 and in Maradona’s performance in 1986. Then there was Brazilian Ronaldinho’s lob that left English goalkeeper David Seaman questioning gravity and the universe itself at the 2002 World Cup. Britain’s relationships with South America have been defined more by football than by anything else. The Hand of God goal and “Goal of the Century”, which came minutes later in the same game, brought joy and spiritual uplift to so many people in Latin America. It represented a “cosmic” rupture in the universal order of things (to quote the classic commentary on the match by Victor Hugo Morales) which up-ended English assumptions of superiority that had been accepted by some elites across the continent. This was particularly the case in Argentina, where English-speaking communities had reached into the hundreds of thousands by the 1980s.
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he depth of feeling that accompanies Maradona’s death speaks to the abiding sense that he was somehow responsible for a moment
