Monthly Archives: December 2022

Pele & Maradona: Contrasting Greatness

by Jimmy Burns Among the claims to football greatness, those of Pele and Maradona,   who died within just over  two years of each other,  will endure as a contrast in character and iconography,  defining between them the developing story of modern football. Pele’s  emerged  on the international scene as  a skinny seventeen-year-old in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. He went on to straddle the transition of football from a game to a serious business venture, breaking cultural  and racial boundaries , his true potential barely registered by the  grey …

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Messi is the greatest, so was Maradona

For fear or being  accused of being a party popper, and in deference to my many Argentine friends who ,  as I write , are having the most joyous and extended  party of their lives, let me first offer my  heart-felt ‘felicidades’. Argentina has  not only won two world cups as a democratic country, but each have  been achieved thanks by the best player of his time,  with a distinct personality and unique set of skills. No need to relegate the memory of the late Maradona to make way for …

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