Is it possible to love something deeply, understand its flaws clearly, and love it anyway?
Not despite the flaws but including them — accepting that the thing you love is imperfect and that the imperfection is, in some strange way, part of what makes it worth loving?
If you have spent any time following football at the level of genuine passion, you already know the answer is yes. Football is a sport where the referee makes mistakes, where the best team doesn't always win, where luck plays a genuinely enormous role, and where the most memorable moments are sometimes the most controversial ones. The sport's capacity for injustice is, irritatingly, one of its charms.
No period in World Cup history illustrates this more completely than the 1980s. And no player illustrates it more completely than Diego Armando Maradona.
1982: Spain and the Argentine Catastrophe
Before 1986 made Maradona a legend, 1982 showed him in a different light. Argentina arrived at the Spain World Cup as defending champions — they had won in 1978, at home, in a tournament whose circumstances were troubled by the political situation in Argentina under its military government. By 1982, the government was different, but Argentina were still expected to contend.
They went out in the second group stage, beaten by Italy and Brazil. Maradona was young, twenty-one years old, and occasionally brilliant. He was also still finding the balance between genius and chaos that would define his career. The most memorable moment of his 1982 tournament was a red card — for a retaliatory kick in the match against Brazil that ended his participation and sent him off the pitch with his head down, the mixture of talent and temper that would characterize the next decade of his life already visible.
In those early matches, you could see what he was. You could also see what he was dealing with. He was, at twenty-one, the most heavily marked player at the tournament — defenders assigned specifically to foul him, to push him, to disrupt his rhythm whenever possible. The referees of the era gave significantly less protection to players like Maradona than the modern game provides. He learned to absorb the physical punishment and to retaliate when he felt the punishment had gone too far. Neither habit was entirely good for him.
Brazil 1982: The Team That Should Have Won
The 1982 Spain World Cup produced one of the great tragedies of football history, which was the elimination of a Brazilian team that many observers have since called the best not to win a World Cup. The Brazilians that year played with the attacking fluency of the 1970 side and the individual quality of multiple generations of extraordinary players: Zico, Sócrates, Falcão, Éder. They scored ten goals in their three group stage matches. They were, in the footballing sense, on a different level from most of their opponents.
They were also playing a philosophy — attack first, attack always — that left them vulnerable in ways they had chosen not to address. Against Italy in the second group stage, they needed only a draw to advance to the semi-finals. They played for a win. Italy, with Paolo Rossi in the form of his life, beat them 3-2.
The match became one of the most analyzed in football history: a study in the tension between attacking beauty and defensive pragmatism, and a lesson that the most beautiful football doesn't automatically produce the best result. Sócrates, who was also a practicing medical doctor and a political philosopher of some seriousness, spoke about the match afterward in terms that went beyond sport — about what it meant to play a certain way knowing the risks, to choose beauty over safety even when the cost could be this high.
He was a remarkable man. Brazil were a remarkable team. They went home in the second round.
Mexico 1986: The Tournament of Maradona
The 1986 World Cup in Mexico belongs to one man. There have been other tournament-defining individual performances — Ronaldo in 2002, Zidane in 2006, Messi in 2022 — but nothing quite matches the scale of Maradona's dominance of the 1986 tournament. He played every match, carried Argentina through situations that should have defeated them, scored some of the best and worst goals in World Cup history, and left Mexico with the trophy in his hands and a story that nobody has yet finished arguing about.
The group stage and early knockout rounds showed Maradona as a creative force of extraordinary power — making goals, creating space from nothing, finding passes that others couldn't see. Argentina were not a great team in 1986; they were a functional team organized around a great player, which is a different and generally less elegant thing.
Then came the quarter-final against England.
The Hand of God
It is, perhaps, the most famous quarter-final in the history of any sport. England and Argentina in Mexico in 1986, five years after the Falklands War — a brief but violent conflict that had left genuine animosity between the two nations — played a match that was never going to be merely a football match.
The first goal was scored in the 51st minute. Maradona gathered a loose ball in the English penalty area and nudged it into the net with his left hand. The referee, unable to see clearly from his position, allowed the goal. The English players protested with the urgency of men who had seen exactly what had happened. The goal stood.
After the match, Maradona was asked about the goal. He said, with a smile that was equal parts mischief and self-satisfaction, that it had been scored "a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God." It became one of the most quoted lines in football history, and one of the most controversial, depending heavily on whether you are Argentine or English.
Four minutes later, Maradona scored the second goal. He received the ball on the right side of his own half, turned, beat one England player, beat another, ran at speed through the center of the park, beat a third player, beat a fourth, went around the goalkeeper, and scored. It took ten seconds. He covered approximately sixty meters. He beat six players.
It was later voted the Goal of the Century in a poll organized by FIFA. Bobby Robson, the England manager, said simply that he had never seen a goal like it and wasn't sure he ever would again. Even the English players whose World Cup dreams had just been destroyed acknowledged, in private and eventually in public, that they had just watched something extraordinary.
These two goals in the same match — the most controversial and the greatest — are, together, the perfect encapsulation of Maradona as a person and as a footballer. Genius and dishonesty in the same four minutes. Humanity's capacity for transcendence and for cheating, present simultaneously in one small, extraordinary man.
Argentina won the tournament. Maradona played every match. He was named the tournament's best player. He was, without question, the best player in the world.
Italia 90: Poetry in Tears
The 1990 World Cup in Italy is the tournament most commonly described as the worst in the event's history, from a purely footballing standpoint. Goals were rare. Defensive football dominated. The final between West Germany and Argentina was so poor — featuring the first red card in a World Cup final, no goals until West Germany's late penalty — that FIFA subsequently changed the rules to try to encourage more attacking play.
And yet Italia 90 is loved. It is genuinely loved by people who watched it at the time, and who have retained an emotional connection to it that the quality of the football doesn't fully explain.
Part of the reason is the music. Nessun Dorma — Puccini's aria, chosen as the theme for the BBC's coverage — became so associated with the tournament that even now, thirty-five years later, it functions as an emotional trigger for a generation of football supporters. Part of it is the emotion that the tournament produced despite and sometimes because of its defensive character.
Roger Milla — a thirty-eight-year-old Cameroonian forward who had been recalled from semi-retirement by his country's president — scored four goals for Cameroon and celebrated each one with a dance around the corner flag that became one of the tournament's defining images. Cameroon reached the quarter-finals, the first African nation to do so, and their performances opened a conversation about African football's potential that is still developing.
Ireland — the actual Republic of Ireland, a country that had never qualified for a World Cup before — reached the quarter-finals under Jack Charlton, playing a style of football that their own supporters occasionally admitted was not beautiful but that produced results through organization and spirit. The Irish fans' celebrations in Italian cities became legendary for their cheerfulness and good humor, and for the number of Italian police officers who ended up in photographs with green-clad strangers.
And there was England's semi-final against West Germany, which ended in a penalty shootout, in which Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle missed, in which Paul Gascoigne cried when he realized he would miss the final through yellow card accumulation, and which produced one of the great images of sporting emotion: Gascoigne's face, tears running down it, the realization of what had just happened written across his features in a way that was almost unbearable to watch.
England went home. West Germany won the final with a penalty scored by Andreas Brehme. Maradona cried after Argentina's penalty shootout loss to West Germany in the final. Italy lost their semi-final to Argentina in a penalty shootout, in their own country, in a moment that the Italian football culture processed for years.
Here are some questions for you to ponder:
What do you make of Maradona's Hand of God goal? Is it possible to separate your judgment of the man from your judgment of that specific act? And what does it tell us about football — and perhaps about sport more broadly — that a moment of clear dishonesty can coexist in the same person and the same tournament with a moment of pure, incomparable genius?
Also: Italia 90 was considered a poor tournament but is remembered with enormous affection. Why do we sometimes love imperfect things more than perfect ones? What does the mixture of frustration and joy in following something through tell us about how we form attachments?
These questions don't have clean answers. But they are the questions that the 1980s World Cup left behind. And they are, in a way, questions about what it means to be human — capable of great beauty and significant flaws, sometimes at exactly the same moment.
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