FINDING DIEGO

A little over a year before his untimely death at the age of 60, Diego Maradona was managing Mexican second-tier side Dorados de Sinaloa - FourFourTwo went deep into drug cartel country to track him down

- Andy Mitten

“GO TO MEXICO AND TRACK DOWN DIEGO MARADONA,”said the editor of FourFourTwo. A simple sentence and such an interesting idea, but so fraught with difficulties.

One: Mexican football’s second division was about to finish and there was little guarantee that he would stay next season.

We had visions of getting there, only to discover Diego pictured lying on a beach somewhere far away. The last regular game of the campaign was mid-April. The earliest we could get there was April 29, days before the Clausura play-off final.

Two: when we made contact with Dorados de Sinaloa, Maradona’s club, they were polite but clear that the Argentine does not give one-on-one sit-down interviews. The 1986 World Cup winner spoke to the media only in pre- and post-game press conferences.

Three: Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico – Diego’s home since taking charge of Dorados – was a byword for narcos and international drug cartels. The United States Intelligence Community regarded the Sinaloa Cartel, of which Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman was the leader, as the most powerful drug trafficking organisation on the planet.

It was a place where few tourists dared to go, and when FFT purchased The Rough Guide to Mexico, there wasn’t one single word on Culiacan, a city of 785,000 people, in its 1,979 pages. Almost every mention of Sinaloa, the state of which Culiacan is the capital, related to crime. Recently, the US had imposed its highest level four ‘Do not travel’ warning on Sinaloa due to the danger to visitors. Syria also had a level four.