113: Diego Maradona (with Conrado Falco) (Patreon)

On the eve of what looks like the most cursed World Cup yet, the host of the Criterion Project podcast Conrado Falco joins the show to discuss Asif Kapadia’s 2019 football documentary Diego Maradona, the Get Back of sports documentaries, assembled from hundreds of hours of video filmed for an abandoned documentary project in the eighties that captured the years Maradona played for SSC Napoli in the Italian premier league.

When Maradona arrived in Naples he was considered a superstar and when he left 7 years later he was the most hated man in Italy. In between Maradona dragged his team to Serie A championships, won a World Cup for Argentina with a mixture of cheating and genius, and got mixed up with the Neapolitan crime family and descended into drug abuse and personal chaos. It’s of a piece with Senna and Amy, Kapadia’s earlier documentaries of remarkable lives destroyed by celebrity told with the skillful use of rare personal archival material.

Plus: Conrado and I wrestle with the moral dilemma of rooting for Messi and Argentina in a World Cup being held in the human rights hellscape of Qatar.

Follow Conrado Falco on Twitter.

Conrado has two podcasts: The Criterion Project and Foreign Invader.

Check out Conrado's webseries Wormholes on YouTube.

Trailer for Diego Maradona (Asif Kapadia, 2019)

The “Goal of the Century” - Argentina vs England, Quarterfinal of the World Cup, June 22, 1986 (immortal commentary by Victor Hugo Morales, with subtitles)

Maradona: a Channel 4 documentary from 1995 that covers things the Kapadia film doesn’t: how Maradona was used as a propaganda tool by the Argentine dictatorship as a teenager, his leftist politics, and the time he tried to evade his football ban by (illegally) coaching an Argentine premier league team on the verge of relegation.