„Diego is dead, long live Diego!“ – Sociological observations on Maradona’s undiminished popularity in Argentina

Abstract

Diego Armando Maradona died in November 2020. The public mourning and communication in reaction to his death are a remarkable illustration of Maradona’s extraordinary symbolic value in Argentina. However, if one considers Maradona’s many escapades, rule-violations, law-breaking and other boundary transgressions, his almost unbroken popularity and literally sacral exaltation during his lifetime and beyond death appear in a different light. In addition to his two doping cases, brawls on the football pitch or obscene gestures against sporting opponents, the list of his out-of-sport misdemeanours is particularly long. What needs to be explained is not only how Maradona was able to remain a hero despite all the scandals, but also to what extent the paradoxes, ambivalences and inadequacies actually contribute to his hero status. For that reason, this article identifies the semantics, rhetorics of legitimation, techniques of neutralisation, stories of justification and other prefigurations that recurrently appear in the general discourse on Maradona. It shows how imaginations of community, protest symbols, the concept of ingenuity, narratives of sacrifice and victimization as well as the semantics of the divine immunise Maradona’s heroic status, stabilise it counterfactually and even additionally promote it.