Ishaan Tharoor
That image of Maradona as an avenging angel, as a tribune of a wronged people, transcended borders. His fame grew in the southern-Italian city of Naples, where he turned up in the mid-eighties to play for the city’s local club, Napoli, which had not won anything in recent memory, and whose supporters chafed against the bigotry of northern Italians. “It had been more than half a century since this city, condemned to suffer the furies of Vesuvius and eternal defeat on the soccer field, had last won a championship, and thanks to Maradona the dark south finally managed to humiliate the white north that scorned it,” the late Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano wrote. “In the stadiums of Italy and all Europe, Napoli kept on winning, cup after cup, and each goal constituted a desecration of the established order and a revenge against history.” Now Messi’s Argentina is the established order, the Goliath shoving the heads of all other challengers in the dirt. https://www.newyorker.com/preview/article/6a579271f96594f6e06b3fc1?status=draft&debug_config=copliot;t=1784159550546