زندگینامه دیگو مارادونا

One afternoon in October of 2017 two scholars met at the University of South Florida, Tampa, in front of the library building. Dr. Pablo Brescia, professor of Latin American Studies at USF, was hosting the visit of Dr. Mariano Paz, a specialist on Latin American Literature and Film at the University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland. Over coffee, they discussed various topics. Football was one of them.

There was one problem however: their football sympathies put them on oppo­site sides of the fence. Dr. Brescia is a fan of Boca Juniors, and Dr. Paz of River Plate, the two most popular football clubs, and historic archrivals, in Argentina. They were about to go their separate ways but, as it has been the case in so many other instances, Diego Armando Maradona came to the rescue. They discovered they shared a passion for Maradona and for all that he encompassed.

And so Diego Maradona: A Socio-cultural Study was born. The email exchanges became longer and longer, the WhatsApp messages more and more frequent and, by the end of 2019, a book proposal was drafted. Many things happened in the following three years: Routledge accepted the proposal; Brescia and Paz built a team of standout contributors to the volume, a devastating pandemic hit the globe and Maradona passed away on November 25, 2020. The book became not only the first academic volume in English dedicated to the study of Maradona’s cultural significance but also a tribute to a most relevant footballer. After his death, the Argentinian government declared three days of national mourning and opened the Casa Rosada (House of Government) for the people to come and pay their respects to their idol. Out of the many photos that went viral on that occasion, one became typically allegorical: a fan from Boca and a fan from River in a warm embrace. Just like the editors of this volume had done five years before. This is only one of the possible Maradonian effects this book explores.