Cover of The Azteca Quarterfinal, a biography of Diego Maradona

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4,636 words · no email, no account

No. 084 · Sport · Football

The Azteca Quarterfinal

a biography of Diego Armando Maradona

Written by Maximiliano Costa · Published 2025 · 59,889 words

What the book is

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.

At a glance

Subject: Diego Armando Maradona
Shelf: Sport · Football
Written by: Maximiliano Costa
Chapters: 18 across 190 pages
Narrated by: Gideon Marsh
Editions: Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
Authorisation: Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.

Contents · 18 chapters

01Villa FioritoRead free
02Los Cebollitas4,523 words
03The Prodigy2,948 words
04Boca2,815 words
05Barcelona2,640 words
06The South2,895 words
07Mexico2,684 words
08The Hand of God and the Goal of the Century4,487 words
09The Scudetto3,519 words
10Italia '902,786 words
11The White Line4,372 words
12The Body2,079 words
13The Camorra2,679 words
14The Fifteen Months3,388 words
15The Women and the Children2,560 words
16The Decline2,843 words
17Fidel, Hugo, and the Political Maradona2,113 words
18The Death of God5,890 words

The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.

Editions

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

The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.

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

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.