Diego Maradona has died, and with him dies one of the greatest soccer players of all time. Daniel, a manager at Ground Support, a legendary coffee house in Soho, Manhattan, expressed it well: “For us, soccer fans, it is as if for the Catholics the pope would have died.”
In my travels around the world, I saw that he was one of the most popular of all athletes. Indeed, it is only in the United States, where "the beautiful game" doesn't yet have a massive audience, that he wasn't well known.
Maradona came from a very poor family, eventually becoming a very rich man. However, he squandered his fortune on drugs and alcohol. When Maradona was a player, he was in remarkable physical form, but sadly, at the end of his life, he became overweight and was plagued with several serious ailments. I believe, however, that very few people ever provoked the kind of admiration that he did.