THOUSANDS descended last Thursday on the presidential palace of Casa Rosada, where the body of Diego Maradona lay in a closed coffin draped in the Argentinian flag and jerseys of the national team and Boca Juniors.

The night before, people emerged onto balconies in the humid Buenos Aires air to applaud and chant his name, while crowds gathered at the Bombonera — the stadium of Boca — and the Obelisk, a historic monument and popular site for football celebrations and political protest.

Inside the palace, mourners filed past the coffin; chanting, praying and crying. Outside the crowd began to swell. Some began to scale the palace gates, and the gendarmerie were deployed to guard the entrance and suspend access to the wake.

The crowds became so large that people filed back one kilometre onto 9 de Julio Avenue, the capital’s main thoroughfare. The city police reacted with violence, riding through on motorbikes and firing rubber bullets over the gathering — leaving a number bloodied.

The authorities, disorganised and without strategy, found no way to disperse the crowds that filled Plaza de Mayo. It resembled the build-up to a big match, with fans gathering from across the city and flags, banners and jerseys colouring the sombre day.

It was an atmosphere cultivated for a king. In the Republic of Argentina, the people know how to elevate mere humans into cultural and mythical idols. The congress may have awarded Eva Peron the title of Spiritual Leader of the Nation, but it was the people who canonised her as Saint Evita. Such honours are reserved for those who have championed the cause of the poorest in society.

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The heights of national admiration were on full display last season when Diego Maradona took charge of the small and struggling top-division side Gimnasia de La Plata. It would be his final campaign.

The No 10 had been away from Argentinian football for almost a decade, managing obscure teams in the UAE and Mexico. His return to Buenos Aires would be his recoronation.

For each away game the choreography would be the same: large crowds waiting to catch a glimpse of “the most human of gods,” as the late great Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano once dubbed him.

Maradona would appear from the tunnel slowly — decades of physical and mental strain pressing the frail, 5’4” figure into the ground. The crowd would chant for him and wave flags adorned with his face. After walking to the middle of the pitch he’d be greeted by eager and energetic dignitaries of the home side, shaking his hand, kissing his cheeks, embracing their hero, handing him plaques and gifts. In such moments they were not rivals, but Argentinians. And for such moments, three matches stand out in particular.

Newell’s Old Boys v Gimnasia de La Plata
A month after taking charge of bottom-of-the-league Gimnasia, the team travelled to Newell’s Old Boys, who Maradona briefly played for in the early ’90s. Gimnasia put in a strong performance and won the game 4-0.

The pre-match performance was equally as strong. A packed home stadium, chanting his name, welcomed their hero with fireworks. Walking to the halfway line he was presented with a number of gifts, including paintings and a throne from which he watched the entire game.

Visually overcome with emotion, he delivered a speech that covered football, his love of Newell’s and invoked his mother — broadcast to a stadium that never stopped chanting his name.

Boca Juniors v Gimnasia de La Plata
It was the final game of the season and victory for Boca would make them league champions if rivals River Plate, one point ahead, failed to win. The Bombonera was supercharged to welcome the return of former player Maradona.

Prior to kick-off, he walked out of the tunnel and headed towards the halfway line to the sound of the Boca fans singing his name. His boyhood club gifted him a commemorative plaque and a framed Boca shirt. Walking away, he prayed and kissed the grass on which he won the league title in 1981. Kisses, hugs and handshakes followed. He continued his walk towards the tunnel, orchestrating the stadium’s chants by wagging his finger, while an aide held his right arm to support his balance.

A Tevez goal from just outside the box slipped through the goalkeeper’s fingers, giving Boca a 1-0 win that would deliver them their 34th league title after River only managed a 1-1 draw.

Gimnasia were bottom of the table. But before further games could be played to figure out relegation and promotion, the league was suspended and all relegations and promotions cancelled. Maradona’s Gimnasia was saved, and his contract was renewed for the 2020-2021 season.

Gimnasia de La Plata v Patronato
The first game of the 2020-2021 season kicked off on the same day as Maradona’s 60th birthday and Gimnasia had organised celebrations to mark the date. He exited the tunnel wearing a face mask and now required two aides to help him walk. Fireworks were let off outside the stadium as he collected more plaques, jerseys and was presented with two three-tier cakes.

Visibly more frail, hunched over as he greeted the dignitaries, he was helped onto his second throne — placed next to the substitutes’ bench. With the game barely under way, Maradona vacated his post on medical advice and headed home to rest. Two days later he was admitted to hospital.

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Maradona represents a million things to millions of people. At his best, he’s remembered as a gravity-defying football genius, charismatic, and aligned to the struggles against anti-imperialism, social injustice and poverty.

Maradona’s body was laid to rest in the province of Buenos Aires, with the faces of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro tattooed on his right arm and left leg.

“I carry him on my arm and in the heart,” Maradona once said of the iconic Argentinian revolutionary. He’d later build a relationship with Fidel Castro, and spoke of his admiration for the Cuban medical system.

“I am of the left,” he once said. “My foot, my faith, my head. I am of the left in the sense that I am for … my country’s progress, for improving poor people’s quality of life, for everyone having peace and freedom.”

His politics may never have developed into a consistent worldview, but he carried within him an intuitive sense of class solidarity and the inherent injustice of international relations.

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It’s hard to overstate how much the ’86 World Cup quarter-final game between England and Argentina meant for South America’s second-largest country. It’s an odd football rivalry, emerging from the history of imperialism rather than geographical proximity.

The Hand of God came at a time of heightened tensions between England and Argentina — the Falklands war was barely four years old. The goal, and victory, was a blow to the old hegemon that had exploited Argentina for the meat and grains of the Pampas, where the British-built-and-managed railway tracks of Welsh steel — scars of foreign dominance — converge on the port of Buenos Aires.

According to University of Bristol professor Matthew Brown, British sentiment surrounding the Falklands war and the Hand of God is wrapped up in the “reluctance to step back from two centuries of imperial engagement with Latin America.”

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Two years before that game, only months into his Napoli career, Maradona had agreed — against the wishes of the club — to play in a charity match in Acerra, one of the poorest areas of Napoli.

It was organised to raise money for a sick boy who needed a life-saving operation that was only available in France. It was reported that the game raised close to £8,000, which was enough for the boy’s travel and medical costs.

Speaking shortly after his arrival in Napoli, Maradona said he “felt as though I represented a part of Italy which counted for nothing.” He felt the sharp divide between the wealthier north and the poorer south, and all the prejudices and racism that come with it.

Some 30 years later he again played for charity, this time in Bolivia for a dual cause. The match was organised in La Paz to gather money and food for victims of a severe flood that had left 73 dead and made 95,000 people homeless.

The city lies at almost 3,640 meters, sandwiched among the mountains, and the game followed a Fifa ban on matches played at altitudes higher than 2,750 meters. It was a game of protest, after which Maradona stated: “We have shown it is possible to play here. All of us have to play where we were born, my brothers and sisters. Not even God can ban that … much less [then Fifa president Sepp] Blatter.”

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The marriage of football and politics is more intimate in Argentina. Political protesters and football fans share songs; beating drums are as synonymous with the sport as with demonstrators in the street; clubs are uncomfortable, informal coalitions between management, politicians, and ultras.

Having formed close relationships with Fidel Castro in Cuba, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, Maradona registered as a member of the Justicialist Party — the official party of Peronism — in 2008.

Alejandro Granados, town mayor of Ezeiza in the province of Buenos Aires — where Maradona lived at the time — told a national news channel: “He told us it would be a great joy to show his father the membership card in the Judicialist Party, because his father is very Peronist … His whole family has always been Peronist.”

Yet 2008 would be the year that he returned to football management for the first time since 1995, taking over the Argentina national team. It put any political aspirations on hold for a decade. 

A year before the 2019 general elections and before the current Peronist President Alberto Fernandez announced his candidacy, it was anticipated that ex-president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner would run. Maradona had publicly wondered whether politics was his next play. He told a national newspaper: “Fidel told me I should dedicate myself to politics, and I should go with [Cristina] … I see people suffer, people who cannot make ends meet until the end of the month.”

Fernandez was chosen to lead the Peronist party, with Cristina as vice-president. Maradona unsuccessfully tried to win promotion to the top division with Mexican side Dorados de Sinaloa. Three months later, he took his final managerial post at Gimnasia de La Plata.

The intimacy of celebrity, pop culture and politics has demonstrated its potency with the election of Donald Trump — and Ronald Reagan before him — in the US; of comedian Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine, and of former cricketer Imran Khan in Pakistan. Argentina’s last president Mauricio Macri first raised his public profile as president of Boca Juniors between 1995 and 2008.

Given Maradona’s mass social support, charismatic character and transcendent, mythical nature for many, it’s hard not to wonder what he could have achieved if he’d entered national politics.