Fernando Signorini, Diego Maradona's former fitness coach, puts it best: 'I would go to the end of the earth for Diego. I would not take a step for Maradona.'
Diego, the boy touched by magic, who called football his 'beautiful toy' and his 'salvation' — enabling him and his family to escape Villa Fiorito, the most decrepit part of Buenos Aires — and capable of anything with the ball at his feet.
And then Maradona, the drug-fuelled superstar who was capable of anything: cocaine, prostitutes, an illegitimate child and a pawn in the clutches of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia.
Diego Maradona being unveiled to the press after signing for Italian side Napoli in 1984
It is almost impossible to know where the first meets the second, where the two entwine and the latter eventually takes over. By the end, Signorini says: 'Maradona would drag Diego wherever he goes'.
Together, they form a footballer whom many still believe to be the greatest ever to play the sport; who led Napoli from the laughing stock of Italy to glory and hoisted Argentina to the top of the world, all framed in the swaggering caricature of a cheat and a liar.
Attempting to unravel those woven strands is Oscar-winning director Asif Kapadia, the man behind Amy and Senna, whose newest documentary, into the life of Diego Maradona, is released this week and is an exceptional insight into the rise and fall of a genius, from god to demon.
Maradona enjoys Scudetto celebrations on the Stadio San Paolo pitch in 1987
By his own admission, Kapadia is fascinated by the troubled genius — or more specifically how fame shapes its victims, lifts them, tortures them, glorifies them while at the same time crushing them. This is the third part of the trilogy.In the previous two films, Kapadia uses just one name. No Winehouse or Ayrton. Here, he uses both. Diego Maradona. It is deliberate. It is as though there are two lives under the spotlight.
It is the cries of 'Diego' that thunder around the San Paolo Stadium as 85,000 frenzied fans await the man being hurtled through the streets of Naples in a small Fiat, among a stream of cars veering so quickly it is as though they are trying to escape the police. When he emerges at the top of the steps that lead out into the stadium another roar erupts around all sides as a flurry of flashbulbs light up his face.
As he sits down for his first press conference, there is a mad scramble above him as supporters fight for a glimpse through a grate in the ceiling of their newest star.
Maradona sits silent among it all: a small 23-year-old almost bewildered by the mayhem he has caused. 'I expect peace,' he had said before his arrival. How little he knew of what was to come. He has experienced so much. From the slums of Argentina's capital to managing his country at a World Cup.
Maradona in his current role, as manager of Mexican second division side Dorados
Yet it is no wonder Kapadia aims his lens at the seven years Maradona spent at Napoli, where the world's greatest player signed for a club with two trophies in its history in a city mocked by its rivals as the 'sewer of Italy', accused of being riddled with cholera with rivals fans' banners instructing their supporters to wash.
No one else would have him. Maradona signed from Barcelona in 1984 for £6.9million, already under a cloud of controversy after a mass brawl at the end of the Copa del Rey final against Athletic Bilbao in 1984. When he inspired Napoli to a first win over Juventus, his free-kick clipped into the top corner, a reporter asked him to explain how the game was won. 'It was not Maradona that did it,' he replied. 'God did it.'
Perhaps in no other city, amid the feral landscape of Naples with its earthquakes and volcanoes, would Maradona
