# The Azteca Quarterfinal *A Biography of Diego Maradona* — Legendary Biographies No. 084 - **Subject:** Diego Armando Maradona - **Written by:** Maximiliano Costa - **Shelf:** Sport / Football - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 190 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 190 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 190 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-043-0) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-024-9) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/084-the-azteca-quarterfinal.html ## About this book Villa Fiorito, 1970. A boy with a left foot the neighbourhood already speaks about in hushed tones juggles an orange in a dirt yard, while his mother tells reporters her son will one day play for Argentina. He is nine years old. From the shantytown outside Buenos Aires to the gilded chaos of Naples, from the stadium in Mexico City where he settled a war with two goals seven minutes apart to the apartment in Tigre where he died alone among nurses who could not save him, Diego Armando Maradona lived in public with an intensity few human beings have been asked to sustain. He was, by turns, a child prodigy, a captain, a cocaine addict, a fugitive, a head of state without a country, and a god in the literal sense — the object of an organised church. Maximiliano Costa follows the body itself: the knee that carried Belgrano's defenders, the lung punctured by ephedrine in 1994, the heart that finally gave out in November 2020 while a medical team now facing homicide charges stood by. What emerges is a portrait of genius as a kind of weather, and of the people — agents, brothers, dictators, doctors — who tried to stand inside it. A biography of the player, the addict, the saint, and the patient. And of the country that needed him to be all four at once. ## Contents 1. Villa Fiorito 2. Los Cebollitas 3. The Prodigy 4. Boca 5. Barcelona 6. The South 7. Mexico 8. The Hand of God and the Goal of the Century 9. The Scudetto 10. Italia '90 11. The White Line 12. The Body 13. The Camorra 14. The Fifteen Months 15. The Women and the Children 16. The Decline 17. Fidel, Hugo, and the Political Maradona 18. The Death of God ## Questions **Who is The Azteca Quarterfinal about?** Diego Armando Maradona. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Azteca Quarterfinal — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,636 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 190 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Maximiliano Costa is a Buenos Aires-based sports journalist who has covered five World Cups for Olé and four Olympics for Clarín. Over three decades in press boxes across the globe, he has focused on the cultural impact of sports. His biographies of footballers focus on the lives outside the eighteen-yard box. In his books, including The Azteca Quarterfinal and The Boy from Rosario, Costa looks beyond the pitch to examine how local communities shape global sporting icons. He uses deep archival research and local interviews to construct his portraits. He lives in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where he collects vintage football match programmes and teaches sports writing workshops.