Diego Maradona

📍Villa Fiorito, Buenos Aires, Argentina

“I grew up in Villa Fiorito, a shantytown on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires, in conditions that were genuinely poor — a tin-roofed house, a dirt floor, a neighbourhood without paved streets or reliable services. My father El Toro worked in a factory and my mother Doña Tota raised eight children with the economy and ingenuity that poverty demands. What Villa Fiorito had in abundance was football: the potrero — the vacant lot — where I played from the moment I could walk, where the game was everything and where I first understood that I could do with a ball things that other people could not. I left the villa at ten to join the Argentinos Juniors youth system, but the potrero of Fiorito was where Diego Maradona was made — not on the manicured pitches of Europe but on the dust and stones of Buenos Aires's poorest neighbourhood.”

Sources: Maradona, D. with Arcucci, D. & Cherquis Bialo, E. El Diego (2000, translated 2004), Yellow Jersey Press; Burns, J. Hand of God: The Life of Diego Maradona (1996), Bloomsbury