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Those seven years also defined an entire footballing era, and it is beautifully captured in Asif Kapadia’s captivating, gut-punch documentary, Diego Maradona, recently aired on HBO and available through Crave.

Photo by Crave/HBO

The straightforward title hints at Maradona’s dual identity: One is affable and private (Diego), the other grotesque and public (Maradona). It’s alluded to in the film by his former trainer, Fernando Signorini, but Maradona’s inner conflict also reflects that of football itself. As wonderful as it is sick, the game is represented by the conflicting passions of the Neapolitans who seem less interested in embracing Maradona than they are in crushing him to death.

While the film follows the familiar contours of the biographical documentary, it also unwittingly records — in stunning archival footage discovered in Buenos Aires after lying dormant for 30 years — the last moments of football in the pre-modern era. It’s messy, corrupt, sometimes violent and also, at times, glorious.

This was football before the rise of television contracts that poured money into the sport, before the Bosman ruling gave out-of-contract players far more bargaining power, and before the breakaway of the Premier League in England provided a model of how to wring the most cash from supporters — seismic events that have given the sport, as its played today, an inescapable commercial gloss.

This was an era when Italian football was king; one I remember growing up in Toronto, walking along College Street, hearing Neapolitan music flow out of niche Italian record stores that might have one or two team photos on the wall of the Italian team that won the 1982 World Cup. The football banner familiar at many grounds today — Against Modern Football — is a call to return to this period, and both Maradona and Napoli were at its heart.