Drugs, scandals and the end of the Maradona fable
Although Napoli had triumphed in 1987, the tensions between manager Bianchi and certain senior players were soon to explode. The last game of the season was a dead match at Ascoli and Napoli played as if they had been celebrating for a week, which they had been. Towards the end of the match, with the score at 1–1, manager Ottavio Bianchi left the bench and the stadium. Songs from inside the dressing room seemed to call for his resignation (‘when will you leave?’) and the manager even offered to resign. Bianchi stayed, but the character clashes with a number of senior players were to resurface with a vengeance at the end of the following season.
The 1987 victory was popular across Italy, but things soon began to change. Mystery still surrounds Napoli’s collapse in the 1988 run-in, when they managed only one point in their last four games, and Milan swept to victory. For years, rumours have circulated concerning the role of illegal betting rings, although no formal inquiry has ever been opened. After 1988, four players were sacked after writing an open letter of protest against their manager. Diego took no blame for the team’s sudden decline. This was his best season on the field – as he scored fifteen goals and linked up superbly with Careca. In 1989, Maradona refused to return for the new season, claiming that the Napoli president had promised him a transfer to Marseille. After a long war of words, Diego came back after four games had already been played and led Napoli to a second championship.
Meanwhile, Maradona became a hate figure across Italy. In 1989 the rivalry with Inter had been violent and the 1989 and 1990 championships saw a bitter struggle with Milan. All this should be put in the context of the re-awakening of north-south tensions, provoked in part by a new and highly successful political movement in the north – the Leagues – whose propaganda drew upon anti-southern prejudice. As sport historians Papa and Panico put it, matches with northern teams ‘took on all the significance of a cultural and ethnic challenge’.17 All this was exacerbated by events during the 1990 World Cup where Naples, the south, Maradona and Argentina were all grouped together by Italy’s fans, especially those in the north. Hatred of Diego reached a peak after his key role in the explosion of Italy’s dreams in the tournament. The booing of the Argentinian national anthem before the final in Rome was the most public display of this antipathy. Enzo Bearzot, Italy’s manager in 1982, later wrote that he was ashamed of the whole affair.
Maradona’s time in Naples was coloured by controversy from the very beginning, and the tale of the various scandals with which he was linked in that period is expertly told by Jimmy Burns in his Hand of God.18 Diego fell in with some unsavoury characters during his time in Naples. He was photographed in a jacuzzi with members of the Giuliano family, at that time ‘Kings of Forcella’, a run-down, central neighbourhood controlled by the Neapolitan version of the mafia, the Camorra. Maradona’s coke habit flourished here, in the sprucedup fortresses of local bosses, during the frequent parties he attended.
On 17 March 1991, in his first season after knocking Italy out of the World Cup, Maradona’s long decline was confirmed. He was found positive for cocaine after a match with Bari and given a massive fifteenmonth ban. The Argentinian fled home with various judges hard on his heels. Many commentators, as well as Diego himself, have constructed elaborate conspiracy theories around this whole affair. It certainly was strange that Maradona was only found positive after the World Cup, as he had been taking cocaine on a regular basis for years. After the draconian ban, Maradona defended himself with wild talk of plots. It was all part of a complicated vendetta against him for daring to knock out Italy in 1990. Certainly, the god-like immunity that Diego had benefited from in the city was on the wane, but the breaking of the spell had begun well before the World Cup. In 1989, the old but damaging photos showing Maradona partying with Camorra bosses in the jacuzzi had been published in a city newspaper. Maradona also argued, this time with more justification, that cocaine was not exactly a performance-enhancing drug. The report of his contribution to the incriminating game wrote that he had ‘turned up only to sunbathe’.
Drugs had been a part of Diego’s life since his time at Barcelona, and remained so throughout his time at Napoli. Later, club president Ferlaino said that everyone knew about Diego’s ‘problem’, but that he was adept enough to stay clean in the days before matches. Otherwise, Ferlaino admitted, the urine samples would be switched so as to fake any tests that were carried out. In any case, he was not the player he had been. All of his six goals that season came from the penalty spot.
Much later, Maradona was forced to contribute to the upkeep of a child he had fathered (in 1986) after DNA tests were carried out. The boy was named Diego Armando. This scandal dragged on during Maradona’s time in Naples. Maradona did not meet the boy until May 2003, on a golf course. Little Diego has now become a minor star in his own right, turning up on a popular reality TV show to play for a media-created team called Cervia.
Later, Diego Senior was sent to trial (in his absence) and charged with drug dealing and pimping. He did a deal with the judges, who gave him a conditional sentence of eighteen months. The tax authorities also investigated his private affairs. Many of these accusations were the work of one man, Diego’s ex-driver, Pietro Pugliese, who had turned state’s evidence. According to Pugliese, Maradona had slept with 8,000 women during his time in Naples, many of whom were ‘found’ through his driver. Pugliese also dragged up the old story of the ‘throwing’ of the 1988 championship after pressure from the Camorra, which ran the illegal betting rings in the city. Maradona never played for Napoli again. At club level, his career was more or less over, at the age of 30, and his international career ended in ignominy with another positive drugs test in 1994.
After Maradona. The long decline of Napoli
In 1990–91, with Maradona frequently injured, late and overweight, the team slumped to eighth. In 1991–2, with Maradona gone for good, Zola began to blossom, scoring twelve times as Napoli finished fourth under Claudio Ranieri, who was, however, sacked after just nine games of the following season. The team then oscillated between mid-table and relegation until the disastrous 1997–8 season, when they finished last. Although they were promoted in 2000, they were soon relegated again, and only just avoided the shame of Serie C in 2002–2003, before bankruptcy led to demotion in 2004.
Napoli’s fans remain amongst the most obsessive (and numerous) in Italy, but their team has gone into financial and on-the-pitch free-fall since the late 1990s. Still, for key matches, the stadium is often a sell-out and local TV stations devote hours and hours of coverage to their local team. The city can still rally around when times are hard. In 2003 some 70,000 turned out for a Serie B relegation battle and the same number attended a Serie C playoff in 2005. Nonetheless, frustration with the side’s recent poor showing has often descended into violence. Players have been physically attacked or threatened on numerous occasions in recent times, most seriously when Napoli defender Francesco Baldini was beaten with iron bars after being followed home by masked fans on motorbikes in November 2002. In February 2004 midfielder Renato Olive was surrounded by five young men who threatened him with a knife and told him that ‘If you don’t win against Messina, we’ll come and look for you again’. After serious flooding damaged the crumbling and dangerous San Paolo in September 2001, opening up huge holes in the concrete, Napoli were forced to play their home games in smaller stadiums all over the south.
Diego, meanwhile, often appears on Italian TV these days, where he is something of a figure of fun: fat, tattooed, a friend of Fidel Castro. A TV comic does quite a good impression of him, but the real thing is much more tragic. Napoli fans always ask him when he is coming back, but only a madman, and Maradona is not mad, would have taken on Napoli at that point in their history. Just when the situation seemed hopeless, salvation arrived for the club in the form of the cinema magnate Aurelio De Laurentis, who sorted out the disastrous financial situation of the team and managed to make them serious competitors for promotion back to the top division. In June