On March 17, 1991, the Argentine champion Diego Armando Maradona, who died last November 25 at the age of sixty, played his last official match at the San Paolo in Naples, where he spent his best seven years of his career and today brings his name.
It was a Napoli-Bari
on the 25th day of the championship. Napoli, the reigning Italian
champion from the previous year, was having a very disappointing season in
which, in addition to the wearing down of a winning team but now at the end of
the cycle, the problems with which his best player was struggling were
reflected. In February 1991, Maradona
had been involved in the unfounded depositions of a Camorrista in a large
Neapolitan investigation into drug dealing and prostitution. The story had deeply
disturbed him and, combined with his cocaine addiction, contributed to cracking
his relations with the city and with the management.
On match day 25 of the second round, Napoli was in the middle of the table, the same area in which they
would have ended the season. In addition to Maradona and the Brazilian Careca - another protagonist of the
successes of previous years - Ciro Ferrara and Gianfranco Zola played in that
Naples coached by Alberto Bigon. Bari was a few positions lower but aspired to
higher positions. It was teams without big names, in whose starting lineup were
Massimo Carrera, later bought by Juventus, and Massimo Brambati, who arrived
from Turin.
It was a rather anonymous game, played for a long time among
the boos of the approximately 50,000 spectators present at the San Paolo, in
which Bari missed a penalty with the Brazilian
Joao Paulo and Napoli won by a measure in the second half thanks to a goal
from Zola: a header right on an assist from Maradona.
A week later in Genoa, against a Sampdoria that would have won the first Scudetto in its history at
the end of the season, Maradona scored
his last goal from a penalty in his last match in Italy. At the end of
Napoli-Bari, he was drawn to undergo a doping test in which he would have tested
positive for cocaine, taken by his admission on the Thursday before the match.
Both on the procedures with which it was carried out, and on the conduct of the
Napoli management, strangely absent during the test, there were several
suspicions: but that Maradona was taking cocaine was known, and therefore the
plausibility of the result was not questioned.
Maradona and his lawyers argued that the use
of cocaine had no relation to sports performance, but the thesis did not avoid
a disqualification of one and a half years. Shortly after the game with
Sampdoria, Maradona then returned to Argentina and thus ended his experience in
Italy and Naples, where he never returned as a footballer.
In the previous seven years, Maradona had led Napoli to the
first important victories in their history-making them a famous team all over
the world. After serving the suspension he only had brief appearances: with
Sevilla in 1992, with the Argentines of Newell's Old Boys between 1993 and 1994
- a period in which he was disqualified for the second time by anti-doping -
and the last three seasons at Boca
Juniors, the last team he had played for before moving to Europe and for
which he was cheering.
