Original subtitles

Diego Maradona rose from street urchin to become a footballing god.

The world's greatest player receives the world's most important football prize.

But he was never to see out his later years, dying at just 60.

The cause of death was given as heart failure.

But what really killed Diego Maradona?

This film pieces together the extraordinary

life of a man who's an addict off the pitch.

Maradona was not just taking cocaine, but he

was drinking a lot of alcohol with the cocaine.

He also relied on a cocktail of pharmaceuticals

to maintain his world-beating performance.

It was amazing that he could walk away from the stadium.

This is how Maradona's lethal lifestyle eventually

became a perfect prescription for his death.

For those that knew Diego Maradona, his story is one

of genius and trauma from the humblest of beginnings.

The streets were not paved with asphalt, so you could play football.

So my dream came true.

Diego, the young kid who comes through the shantytown and wants to conquer the world,

through his talent in football and who keeps going back to that time in the

streets when he played football with his mates and wants to be that kid forever.

My first dream is to play in the World Cup.

And the second is to become the champion.

That's what I want to do.

Somehow I think God, when he was born, sprinkled a bit of special dust on him.

So there he was with this immense personality.

But he never forgot that he was Diego from the slums of Buenos Aires.

And that little Diego was the person who I became very fond of.

As a young child, Maradona receives a gift from his uncle.

The gift of a football.

That will change his life.

Diego first got into football thanks to his uncle Cirilo, who used to be a

frequent visitor to the little shanty hut where they lived in Villafiorito.

And who gave him his first ever toy.

Maradona's former trainer, Fernando Signorini, recalls how obsessed he was

with the simplicity and peace of his childhood.

He told me that he played 10 hours a day, many times alone, playing against the

wall, against the fence, against the pots in the house.

One of the many people to recognize

Maradona's potential was a local truck driver.

You have to imagine the scene of an Argentine truck driver who had a sort of

part-time job advising the local youth team.

And he sees this group of kids in this open ground.

And in the middle he sees this one kid.

And it's little Diego Maradona doing magic with his left foot.

And he looked at him and said, you know, this is a sort of gift from God.

This kid is just amazing.

But soon after joining a local team, the 10-year-old

Maradona experiences the first of many injuries.

A defender hit him very badly with the tip caps.

That night, the fever went up to 40 degrees.

The next morning, at 6 in the morning, he was taken to a doctor, Dr. Barman.

This was the first time that they put a

syringe in his knee and took out black blood.

That was the first big injury, the first big

setback that Diego had in his football life.

Maradona recovers and rises through the juniors team, Los Chabolitas.

He started to form part of that emblematic club that became famous in Argentina

because he won more than 250, 260 games without losing.

Maradona's early skills are way beyond his years.

He's a prodigy.

But his poverty-stricken childhood has left him at a disadvantage.

Maradona's upbringing was very difficult.

He was quite malnourished as a young child.

And, of course, a lack of vitamins, a lack of nutrients and a lack of energy

may well have inhibited his growth in the early stages of his development.

I think it's very important to understand what happens then in his early years to

then see how it all transforms when he becomes an adult.

Maradona begins a course of treatment with a local doctor to build up his physique.

He understood who Diego was.

And although some gave him a certain diet in addition to a vitamin supplement to

help him grow, because it was one of the issues that Diego wasn't so well

developed, we're talking about the 70s, 71s, and then it

exploded, partly because of the effectiveness of that treatment.

In the whole area of drugs, what players would

be given was far less regulated than it is today.

And in Argentina, it was very, very chaotic.

Three years later, Diego's physique was different.

And not to mention what it would be two years later when he made his debut.

At 15, Maradona signs with Argentinos Juniors,

the youngest player to play in the first division.

Diego, from those early years, was destined to have his encounter with a

whole series of dubious characters who claimed to be helping

him, who literally didn't have his best interests at heart.

By the beginning of the 80s, Maradona has made the

journey from a skinny child to a well-built footballer.

From that moment on, because of the magic of his left foot, all the things that

happened to him later in his life fell on top of him.

For a footballer, Maradona not only looks unusual

at barely 5'5", he's different on the inside too.

The fact that he was able to be so obsessive about it and played and

practiced and practiced and practiced from being

so young would definitely have shaped his brain.

Our brains are plastic and they mold to the experiences that we have.

With Maradona, we see a player who had excellent ball control.

He was renowned as being one of the best dribblers of a football in the world.

And that motor ability would have been developed in his youth, in his early

years, when he was exposed to kicking a ball, to

running with a ball, to dribbling with a ball.

It would have helped to really fine-tune that motor ability, fine-tune those neural

pathways to ensure that he had the ball control and the

skill that he was renowned for throughout his career.

The young Maradona hard-wires himself to be in complete control of the ball.

You know, when we're a kid, we love to be good at something.

Being good at something, as long as there is positive reinforcement and there's

something that's a reward for him, in that means that he'll keep trying and

keep expressing the talent that he has and getting better and better.

As his career progresses, his income rises, along with

the pressure to support a growing number of dependents.

He was already the head of the family, a family that, of course, had already come

out from the shanty town where they were lived in, and they had bigger apartments,

but they started to depend on him.

For Maradona, family is everything.

He starts to provide for the family, which means that he's got a huge amount of

responsibility, and he knows that he cannot get injured, that he's got to do

well, that everybody expects him to become a professional of a higher caliber,

so to pay for everything, really.

But that responsibility also has got a price.

He's carrying that weight of responsibility for not just himself and

his own success, but for his family, his most loved, from such a tender age.

And I think that that would have meant he was more relentless, more willing to do

whatever he needed to do, but also suffering at some level.

In 1981, at the age of 20, he transfers to the legendary

Argentinian First Division club, Boca Juniors, for US$4 million.

Maradona's arrival at Boca sees him achieve national recognition.

It was really sort of the beginning of his, certainly

his upward curve in the big business of football.

It was one year before the World Cup in Spain in 1982, so

his value as a player was being upped, and it was important.

It was a big contract at that time, which paved the way for his inclusion in

the World Cup team of Argentina that goes in 1982 to Spain.

I think that at this moment he is the most important player in international football.

Maradona makes the move to the international stage at the 1982 World Cup.

Alongside stars like Ozzy Ardiles.

And with him, other stars of 1978.

Mario Kempis, scoring goal one.

Daniel Bertoni, goal two.

And the new idol, Diego Maradona, making goal three.

It's a dream come true.

The dream at the football level is to win the World Cup and the 1982 World Cup.

Despite high hopes for his World Cup debut,

Maradona is sent off in a brutal game with Brazil.

And Argentina are knocked out in the second group stage.

Trying to build a team around Maradona in 1982, it was the old players, or the

veterans that won the 78 World Cup, and the new

ones, and the mixture didn't really fully work.

Despite Argentina's defeat, Maradona's ascent

from childhood prodigy to global star is underway.

As the pressure mounts, Diego Maradona copes by

thinking of himself as two separate identities.

We see a lot in superstar athletes that very

intense psychological ability to compartmentalize.

And it's almost a split with Maradona.

He describes it almost as a split.

Keeping a little piece of Diego Maradona separate from what everybody else thought

they owned a piece of was a place for him to retreat to.

But Diego has no idea at this stage how big Maradona will become.

It does have a dark side.

And managing that success, that fame, that adulation, you know, is a tough gig

and needs a lot of support to get that right.

Maradona's incredible skills make him a target for midfielders and defenders.

Injuries and increasingly the use of

painkillers are becoming ever more frequent.

Part of the problem is that there is a temptation to use painkilling injections

and painkilling prescription drugs to mask the pain.

The after effects are worse because the injury has been exacerbated because you've

played at a time when you shouldn't have played and you've ignored the pain.

As Maradona arrives on the global stage, drugs seem to

have become well established in his footballing career.

The issue of infiltration in Diego was part of his ego, of Maradona.

Since he started in the first division, he always had collateral needs to play.

In 1982, Maradona is brought by Barcelona for the record sum of 7.

6 million US dollars.

Joining such an important club as a star player is a huge honour.

But the move will have a terrible effect on his body and his mind.

When Diego arrives in Barcelona, at first he feels incredibly solitary,

very, very alienated, thousands of miles away from

his home country, the environment he was used to.

To fight the loneliness, Maradona brings friends

over from Argentina to live with him in Spain.

I remember talking to some of the players and they said it was like being with a

school kid who had been thrown into this big world in Barcelona and was trying to

come to terms with it and was totally ill-prepared for it.

Feeling lonely in the dressing room is just

the start of Maradona's problems at Barcelona.

His sublime skills mean he can't be contained,

so opposition teams resort to taking him out.

This brutal tattle by the so-called Butcher of Bilbao not only puts Maradona

out of action for over three months, it will haunt him for the rest of his career.

It did involve, eventually, him having to take

cortisone injections quite regularly in his left ankle.

It was difficult to recover from that.

He never fully did, so the ankle didn't have the flexibility that he had had

before, but he had, as he always did, he had to adapt to that.

Despite the injury, Maradona will play on.

In Diego's life, playing and not stopping was part of being Maradona.

He was a football player, but he was Maradona,

and he had to be there, and he had to give up.

Everything moved in relation to Maradona as a player.

And in that sense, Diego had to play, even

though he was physically ill and had an injury.

After an operation to repair bone and tendon damage in his

ankle and the use of painkillers, he returns to the pitch.

You can very quickly and very easily become

addicted to painkillers because that's the way out.

That's the only route that you have to get you

back playing in front of the fans and the cameras.

But another new drug has entered his life.

He began taking cocaine when he was in Barcelona because he thought it was like

drinking Cuba Libres while in the nightclubs.

The trouble is, Maradona is a star.

He has a forceful personality, wealth, powerful

friends, and access to any substance he wants.

It's impossible to say no to him.

Diego himself, literally with a click of his finger, with a phone call there,

with a message there, suddenly getting what he wanted almost instantly.

Maradona is starting to show signs of addiction to alcohol and cocaine.

I think it was cocaine that he used to confront

and confront everything the world demanded of him.

The one who came from El Fiorito, who, as he said one day, they kicked me

and they took me to the top of the mountain, but they left me alone and no

one explained to me how to survive the invades of

fame, sometimes that almost bloody persecution.

Illicit drugs and alcohol are both disinhibitors and numbers.

They numb pain.

So when he was at his lowest and when he was feeling the most lonely and lost,

that was an easy thing for him to turn to, to deal with that.

Maradona's journey at Barcelona has been marked

by loneliness, injury and increasing drug use.

But an offer from a new club will see him reach

new heights of glory and even deeper despair.

In 1984, Napoli is a city on the edge, ridden with mafia corruption,

poverty-stricken.

The populace has two joys in their lives, Catholicism

and football, and they're about to get a new saint.

Diego arrives like the second coming in a real sense.

All these adoring fans feeling that the saviour has arrived in their midst.

For Massimo Vignati, whose father ran the Napoli changing

rooms at San Paolo Stadium, Maradona becomes a family friend.

Maradona signs to Napoli for another record sum of around 10 million dollars.

The club are at the bottom of the league and facing possible relegation.

From the beginning, when 70,000 people were waiting for him to what he was

really, the beginning of a love story, from that moment

on, he realized that something special was happening.

The warm welcome at Naples is like gaining a new family for the lonely Maradona.

But this family numbers in the millions and will become ever more demanding.

When he arrived, he saw how people welcomed him

and he immediately fell in love with the people.

Because then, at a distance, let's see, he was one

of the people because he stood against everyone.

He always defended the people.

And even here in Naples he had a war with the north.

The power of the north.

Despite being fired up by the warmth of his fans and teammates, Maradona begins

his time at Naples with a monkey on his back.

Injury.

He is physically having to deal with the injuries he's already had on his left

ankle, the injections that he has to submit himself to in terms of going on playing.

Now, more than ever, Maradona is relying on pain relief to keep him playing.

Cortisone injections.

Don't forget, we were in a time when people were administering cortisone

injections to players to get them back on the field again.

It was, OK, you got a pain, we'll give you a jab, you play next week.

I suspect he was given cortisone systemically

through the vein where the cortisone is not present.

It's not just affecting the joint, it's having its effects all over the body

and these can be terrible for things like the heart.

Initiatized against the pain, Maradona feeds off the love of the people of Naples

and inspires his team to rise up through the Italian Serie A.

At first he said, I'll show you how it's done.

And he was the happiest man in the world.

I mean, the number is incredible.

For me, our Lord told him, you are my disciple of prison.

On the pitch, he was just superb.

It was a strong team and he was, he was floating.

He was just, you know, he was in the flow.

He was completely at the best version possible.

Physically, he was sharp.

Psychologically, he was strong.

The hero worship from the Neapolitans reaches new levels of intensity.

Encouraged by Maradona's deep-seated need for adulation.

I think he loved being popular.

He loved to display his talents.

He loved the, he loved the love.

Obviously it was difficult at times and very intrusive.

He was Diego.

He loved being loved and he loved to give love.

He went to the end of the world, but with Maradona he didn't take a step.

Because he was unbearable.

He couldn't go to dinner because people would throw themselves at him.

He would put his hand on the plate to ask for an autograph.

He would throw his hair to run away.

Well, he answered me that yes, he was right.

But, if it weren't for Maradona, I would still be in Fiorito, right?

But too much love can be a bad thing.

The hero worship is so relentless, it places new stresses on Maradona.

He had to be a god.

He had to be an immortal.

He wasn't allowed to be ordinary anymore because that would have been disappointing.

And the cost of that, I think,

psychologically is dramatic for a young man.

When he is off the pitch, Maradona blows off steam with increasingly risky behavior.

Diego was attending parties at which senior figures of the local mafia were the hosts.

Definitely, Diego, in terms of his cocaine use, was getting into serious abuse.

And his nightlife was becoming legendary.

The Camorra, the powerful Neapolitan mafia clan which holds sway over the city,

cultivate the relationship with Maradona.

It was easy to get, to get cocaine.

The Camorra was very close to him, invited him to parties.

He loved that kind of lifestyle, a

lifestyle of, of everything you can imagine.

Parties that lasted a long time.

He's a, he's a charmer.

Everybody wanted to be around him.

He was, he was a god in earth.

Maradona develops a coping strategy to maintain his form on the pitch,

despite growing cocaine and alcohol consumption.

So there'd be party days in, in Naples after a game.

But those days ended on the day that Diego said, right,

match date, four days time, however many days it was.

That's it, focused.

And this body just got back into shape again.

But he's doing long-term damage to his body.

Maradona was not just taking cocaine, but he

was drinking a lot of alcohol with the cocaine.

One of the issues with cocaine and alcohol is it results in a metabolite called

cocaethylene, which is much, much more potent than cocaine.

It also means that the effects of cocaine linger on for much, much longer.

And it is much more detrimental to the heart and liver compared to cocaine alone.

Both drugs damage the heart, but the combination is really lethal.

Diego Maradona's time in Italy, in Naples, is,

I would say, a defining chapter in his life.

It is also a period where the downward spiral descent on the personal front

begins, not just his abuse of drugs, but the disintegration of his personal life.

So he was asphyxiating atmosphere.

He was injections because he had pain everywhere.

He was fans that wanted more, like Amorra that was next to him.

Him abandoning himself because he needed to disappear

from that world and come back to it to keep playing.

That's the world that he had in Napoli.

As if things can become more extreme, the most loved player

in the world is about to become one of the most hated.

Maradona is selected to be team captain for Argentina at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.

He's confident that he can lead Argentina to victory.

He had the talent that he so believed in and so

believed was unique and also he wanted to win.

Historically, France and West Germany always do well, but

I think Argentina and England are very strong this year.

Knowing his vulnerability to injuries, his opponents

fouled him 53 times throughout the tournament.

Diego played at a time when they kicked nonsense out of him.

They kicked every part of his body.

They jumped on him.

They elbowed him.

And the referees just allowed it to happen.

They wanted to break him.

Maradona would finish a game having received far more tackles, been fouled far

more regularly and inevitably those challenges, that literally

being a marked man, meant that he suffered more injuries.

In the run-up to the last World Cup, Argentina

and England were at war over the Falklands.

Now, as they face their nemesis, the eyes of the world are on Maradona.

Diego Maradona single-handedly dominates the tournament.

Everyone talked about him because he was at the height of his game.

Maradona's hand-of-God goal is allowed and takes Argentina to 1-0.

It was revenge for that humiliation in this war against the imperialist English.

It's followed by the goal of the century.

Certainly his second goal will go down as one

of the best goals ever in a World Cup Finals.

Maradona achieves his childhood dream.

Barely a year later, Giuseppe Bruscolotti plays

alongside Maradona as Napoli win the Italian Serie A.

When you win it's against Juve first then the Milanese.

For the Neapolitans it's the greatest joy.

We've all touched the sky there.

Now, normality for Maradona is a distant memory.

Whenever he drove through Naples people used to jump on a car if they stopped at

traffic lights and jump on the bonnet and try and just touch him.

He was like a god.

You know, I have a desire to walk for Naples freely.

I don't think he could walk because the way he was loved he couldn't even walk.

The Neapolitans the way he was in love with that man just touch him and say I

don't wash my hands anymore because I touched Maradona.

The problem is when he put his foot on the street

he transformed because Napoli was truly aficionado.

It was impossible for him to control that environment.

It wasn't even that Diego wanted to show off or wanted to be the center of

attention although he enjoyed that obviously.

In a way it was because he was too nice.

He couldn't say no to people who he liked.

So they just came along for the ride.

The intense adulation in Naples is becoming too much.

As Maradona parties in the clubs he looks like a man seeking oblivion.

That idea of escape of numbing of becoming something else for a moment to be free

from the pain of being you whether that's physical

or emotional for a few hours is very compelling.

He already was taking a huge amount of cocaine.

Now in his late 20s with spiraling addiction and persistent injuries staying

in shape for the pitch takes increasing effort.

Physically he was struggling either a toe or his

back or the ankle there was always a problem.

Maradona was on a cycle of injury getting thrown back into training and into playing

at a high level and then suffering from further injuries.

He took huge punishment it was amazing that he sometimes having run and been

kicked around the pitch for 90 minutes that he could walk away from the stadium.

Maradona was required to perform week in week out.

I don't think he had much time off.

So you can imagine a 90 minute game of football and intensive training is

associated with musculoskeletal injury and pain that he had to run through.

World Cup Italia 1990 The 29 year old Maradona

is once again proudly representing Argentina.

It was a very very difficult tournament.

He was playing for an Italian club but representing Argentina and he's about to

discover that great love can turn on a dime and become intense hatred.

Argentina knock Italy out of the World Cup on the home turf.

And it's all over.

The host nation's dream.

It's been an extremely difficult time for him of split loyalties.

He had so much love from both places and so much love for both places.

What that tournament did was begin to see the

beginning of the end of Diego's time in Italy.

Maradona's enormous Italian fan base lash out at their former hero.

For a man who thrives on adulation it's deeply traumatic.

Then you remember in Rome the scene there the whiskey I printed that image here

because it was the most sad moment of his life.

After that Italy decided to give up on him.

Quite clearly he became too noisy too high maintenance for the club.

That's a form of psychological rejection and trauma

that doesn't always make sense to the person.

Maradona begins to accept that his drug and alcohol abuse is a major problem.

Sadly he got into substances which made it nearly impossible to recover from.

If he went beyond that line in the sand it was going to become irrecoverable.

In an interview certainly Maradona admitted that he was addicted to cocaine

and it was probably something that was going

to stay with him for the rest of his life.

Where was he going to go from Napoli?

There was nothing left for him to achieve.

Drugs were the only place I'm not suggesting it's where people do that.

In March 1991 Maradona's glory days in Italy

end in the ugliest and most public of ways.

A drugs test reveals cocaine in his system.

Undoubted he had been taking cocaine but he insisted

that he hadn't taken it to enhance his performance.

Maradona is banned from playing for Napoli for 15 months.

The man who achieved his childhood dreams is now watching them turn into a nightmare.

Rejected by Naples Maradona plays for a short

spell in Spain before returning to Buenos Aires.

He told me and he's always said that addiction is an illness.

Very much so.

You cannot treat somebody that's ill the way that football has treated him.

Football show actually looked after the ones that

have got addiction and the ones that are ill.

Back in Argentina there is still great love for Maradona and in 1994 he's thrown

a lifeline to lead his country the World Cup in America.

By the time he gets to

the World Cup reasonably fit by the national squad and the

national doctors and by FIFA to play in the tournament.

Maradona somehow overcomes his demons and goes to work on getting match fit.

He prepared the World Cup very well.

He made an effort beyond what the coach is asking him to do.

To lose weight to get sharp and to have enough stamina.

And then the effort he was going to make among other things also had to do with

leaving cocaine in Buenos Aires and not taking a single milligram.

The 33-year-old Maradona is a revelation at his first match.

His speed and accuracy on the pitch seemed to be that of a younger man.

But then comes a crazed and telling moment.

Diego scores a goal.

He goes rushing over to the cameras and screams.

And the picture that goes viral around the world

is of this sort of almost demonic look of Diego.

And everyone is saying uh-uh, what's he taking?

At the following match against Nigeria, Maradona is given a doping test.

He tests positive for five different types of ephedrine.

The drug and performance enhancer has long been banned by FIFA.

Maradona had five different types in his bloodstream and these included

pseudo-ephedrine, non-pseudo-ephedrine, met-ephedrine and phenyl propanolamine.

So five different types suggesting that they weren't

something that were given just for medicinal reasons.

Ephedrine and its variants cause the metabolism of the body to work at a much

faster level so you feel more alert, heart rate increases and so on.

There may well be a temptation to take a drug

such as ephedrine to offset the impact of alcohol.

Some of these agents also make you feel very, very happy

and euphoric and they also suppress your appetites.

The heart really does work very hard.

It's beating vigorously, the blood pressure is very, very high.

So apart from giving someone a high, it's causing a massive load on the heart.

When the news came it was incomprehensible because the effort was brutal,

brutal, brutal that I had made.

The inevitable news arrived soon after the positive test.

Maradona is banned by FIFA for 15 months.

Diego Maradona remains suspended from all footballing activity.

Despite the shame, his deteriorating health and

lifestyle, he's desperate to stay in the game.

And rejoins his old club, Boca, in 1995.

He returned to the Bombonera, received as a returning hero, although evidently

overweight, not looking like a player that was

going to be able to keep fit in every game.

He didn't sleep well, so he took a lot of sleeping pills.

And they don't mix well with alcohol.

Decades of brutality on the pitch, combined with his excessive lifestyle,

have finally caught up with Maradona.

And it shows.

Certainly the last 20 years of his life was a series of reaching a down in terms

of his addiction, then trying to come back into football.

Finally, at an emotional game in 1997, arguably the greatest footballer who ever

lived admits that his playing days are over.

But now, he has to face life without football.

His losing football was everything for him.

To take the football away from Diego left him naked.

With his playing career behind him, Maradona's health is on a downward spiral.

The long-term injury problems, the arthritis that Maradona suffered from

after his career will have been as a result of the knocks, the tackles,

the twists, the turns, and the very physical demands that regular training and

a high number of matches have had on his body.

Maradona tips into full-blown alcoholism.

What do I do now?

I've done everything, isn't that great?

I'll go and have a drink.

Why?

Because you want to get into another little place, out of your head space.

Alcohol has a long-term damage on the body, it

damages the liver, it causes weight to increase.

In the very latest years of his life, you know, he's turned to alcohol when he

didn't have discipline or routine or rigor.

And in the long-term, alcohol is devastating to the body.

But he, many times, let himself go to enthusiasm, even if he was with friends,

he didn't hold back.

The big wake-up call arrives in the year 2000.

Maradona has his first heart attack.

It's a very sad story.

It was all self-destruct, it was all downhill.

The heart attack is the result of a cocaine overdose.

He flees to Cuba for rehab with the support of his friend Fidel Castro.

Now in his forties, Maradona tries to save himself.

Maradona went to Cuba to rehabilitate and kick this cocaine habit.

That would have been very, very difficult for someone who had been using it for so

many years because stopping cocaine causes agitation, apathy, lack of energy.

You've then got the issue of eating excessively.

Maradona enters a vicious cycle of rehab, relapse and ballooning weight.

In 2004 he has another heart attack and this time

he can't be blamed on a single cocaine overdose.

Maradona survives and undergoes gastric bypass

surgery to relieve the strain of obesity on his heart.

But this procedure has its downsides.

Now we're talking about a chap like Maradona

who had used cocaine for over 22 years.

This prolonged increase in heart rate for a long, long time in his life would have

resulted in his heart becoming very weak and in those sorts of people the loss of

nutrition that goes hand in hand with bariatric surgery

may have accelerated his heart failure and death.

Despite the surgery Maradona's weight still

fluctuates wildly but he's desperate to get back

He came back as a manager of a Mexican team, he

came back as a manager of a Middle Eastern team.

But a player with the genius of Maradona doesn't necessarily make the best manager.

You know, he became a manager, all that is just part of the end,

of an end that was stretched because he just couldn't live without the ball.

Once he reaches his 50s his hopes of a different life

in football are continually smashed by ill health.

His lifestyle and his habits were almost certainly a contributing factor.

A man who'd had heart attacks, who was known to have other heart

problems, who was taking agents that were contributing to this.

His drug addiction and binge drinking, his binge

eating was sad, terrible, tragic to behold.

In November 2020, Maradona has emergency

surgery to remove a blood clot in his brain.

I think the anaesthetists would have had major concerns

about his risk during that perioperative period.

So getting him through the operation, so he would have been

a very high risk individual for any form of major surgery.

His fans are hopeful that their idol will recover, as he always has done before.

And his spokespeople feed them the right lines.

Tragically, just days later, Maradona's heart finally gives up.

On the 25th of November 2020, he's found dead at home in Buenos Aires.

One of the greatest footballers that ever lived died at just 60 years old.

The cause of death was heart failure, and there is no doubt in my mind that

these cardiac problems were due to the

cocaine and alcohol habit that he had formed.

They definitely contributed to his morbidity and eventually his death.

We know that athletes generally live around

seven years longer than the general population.

So someone like him who had been extremely athletic

to die in his early sixties is a very premature death.

A preliminary autopsy, widely reported by Argentine

media, reveals pulmonary oedema caused by heart failure.

But the lifetime of pressure, addiction and

abuse of his body have all helped lead him there.

But I was waiting.

Yes, I was almost sure that...

I even told a friend.

It's in the end.

No, no, no, I didn't think it would be that fast.

Having lived a life impossible to live for a human being.

I wanted to do more than the human condition and the human finitude.

Diego is going to be like what he was.

A kid who played the ball and was the best of all.

If Diego Maradona had born into a different

time, he would have been treated differently.

He would not have suffered so much.

He would have been better advised.

And he would have not only survived,