Diego Maradona might be a terrible human these days (his 2018 World Cup exploits are proof of that), but in his prime, he was one of the finest footballers to walk the planet.

When he wasn’t scoring contentious goals with the ‘Hand of God’, he was causing havoc off the field, and his time with Napoli is especially infamous.

All in all, he scored 115 times in 259 games for the club, became captain, and led them to their first ever Serie A title in 1986/87.

Over to the Guardian:

The full trailer has been released for Diego Maradona, a feature-length documentary about the Argentinian legend’s time at Italian club Napoli. Produced from over 500 hours of footage from Maradona’s personal archive by the Academy Award-winning team behind Senna and Amy, the film will trace his on and off the pitch exploits in Italy during the 1980s.

The man certainly lived large:

The movie will hit cinemas on June 14, but is due to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next week. Legendary director Asif Kapadia almost didn’t get involved with the project, but then he struck gold.

This from Yahoo:

Despite swearing never to make another sports film after “Senna”, Kapadia caved in when he discovered a cache of footage from Maradona’s mythic period playing for Napoli.

“It was infamous,” he told a documentary conference in Copenhagen earlier this year, with some sequences showing the player partying with dons from the Camorra, the Neopolitan mafia.

They were meant to go into a 1991 documentary that was never shown.

“We managed to get our hands on them and thought, ‘He is really interesting and his journey is incredible.’ What he gets up to, and what happens to him, has much wider themes,” Kapadia said.

Maradona also agreed to talk, sitting down for three long interviews because “he liked ‘Senna’. That was one of the reasons we were able to get through the door.”

Kapadia, who has invented his own genre of “true fiction” documentaries, concentrates on Maradona’s Naples years, the most operatic part of his career.

This release date cannot come soon enough.

Still, he’s no Messi…

[sources:guardian&yahoo]