In June 1978, the World Cup came to Argentina. The military junta of General Jorge Rafael Videla had seized power two years earlier, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Isabel Perón in a coup the United States quietly encouraged. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had told Argentina’s foreign minister in 1976: “We want you to succeed. If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” Kissinger attended the 1978 World Cup as the personal guest of General Videla, watched Argentina play, and praised the regime’s “outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces.” The declassified cable from his own National Security Council staff described his praise as “the music the Argentine government was longing to hear.”
While the matches were being played, the torture was continuing. The infamous Navy Superior Mechanics School — ESMA — was a concentration camp less than a kilometer from the River Plate stadium where Argentina played its home matches. Prisoners held there could hear the roars of the crowd during games. Thirty thousand people “disappeared” during the Dirty War — kidnapped, tortured, drugged and tossed from military airplanes into the Río de la Plata to drown. Many of the victims were students, journalists, trade unionists, and anyone deemed subversive by a regime that the United States had organized, funded, and encouraged through Operation Condor — a coordinated campaign of state terror across six South American military dictatorships.
Outside the stadium, a group of women had been marching every Thursday since April 30, 1977. Fourteen mothers had gathered for the first time at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires — the large square in front of the presidential palace — to demand information about their disappeared children. Public assembly was illegal under the dictatorship, so they began walking in circles around the pyramid at the center of the plaza. They wore white headscarves made from the cloth diapers of their missing children. They embroidered the names and birth dates of the disappeared onto the fabric. They carried photographs. The military called them “las locas” — the madwomen — and were baffled about how to suppress a protest of grieving mothers without provoking a backlash. Eventually they turned their violence on the movement itself. In December 1977, one of the founders, Azucena Villaflor, was kidnapped outside her home, tortured, and thrown from a military airplane into the sea. Two other founding members were taken from a church meeting and killed in the same manner. Their deaths did not stop the march. Azucena Villaflor had told them before she was taken: “Even if I’m not around, keep going.”
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo used the World Cup’s global visibility to make the dictatorship’s crimes visible to an international audience for the first time. Foreign journalists covering the tournament saw them marching. Human rights organizations in Europe and North America launched campaigns under the slogan “football yes, torture no.” Amnesty International organized letter-writing drives. In France, over two hundred local committees formed under the banner “No football in the concentration camps.” None of this stopped the tournament. Argentina won. General Videla lifted the trophy. Henry Kissinger smiled for the cameras. The torture continued.
Diego Maradona — the seventeen-year-old who would go on to become, by wide consensus, the greatest fútbol player who ever lived — was in Buenos Aires that June, and he was not on the field. Argentina was hosting the tournament, and much of the country wanted him on the roster, but the coach chose to exclude him from the squad, judging him too young to carry the pressure of a home World Cup. “I cried my eyes out when I was not considered,” Maradona said of the snub. He spent the tournament his country’s dictatorship was using to launder its reputation watching from the outside — too young to play in it, but not too young to understand exactly what was happening.
This is the history that FIFA carries into every World Cup it hosts. It is the history it carried into Kansas City on June 16, 2026, when FIFA president Gianni Infantino sat in the VIP section of Arrowhead Stadium to watch Lionel Messi’s Argentina defeat Algeria 3–0. Maradona had a word for this. In 2019, one year before his death, he resigned from FIFA’s Legends program after concluding that the organization was going in the wrong direction. “Since Blatter and Grondona left,” he wrote in his resignation letter to Infantino, “FIFA hasn’t changed a bit. No change.” He added: “They treated us as if we were little dogs that only needed to be fed and that’s it. A total lack of respect.” When Maradona died in November 2020, Infantino called him “simply immense” and said fútboll owed him “eternal gratitude.”
Maradona would have laughed. Then he would have said something unprintable about Infantino, just as he had said something unprintable about George W. Bush at the 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata — where he boarded a train full of protesters alongside Hugo Chavez, wore a shirt bearing Bush’s image and the words “war criminal,” and called the American president “human garbage” in front of tens of thousands of people. He said: “Argentina has dignity. Let’s throw Bush out.” He meant every word.
Diego Maradona was born on October 30, 1960, and raised in a shantytown on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires with no clean water, no paved roads, and open sewers running between houses where families survived on construction work, factory shifts, and whatever else could be found. His father left for work at 4am. His mother told the children she had already eaten so they could have larger portions. On his third birthday, an uncle brought him a worn leather ball. He slept with it under his arm.
From those streets he became what Messi himself later called the greatest player in history. “Even if I played for a million years,” Messi said, “I’d never come close to Maradona. Not that I’d want to anyway. He’s the greatest there’s ever been.” Maradona returned the admiration: “I have seen the player who will inherit my place in Argentine football and his name is Messi. Messi is a genius.” Between them they produced the most complete account of what a human being can do with the ball that the sport has ever seen.
But Maradona never forgot where he came from. He had Che Guevara tattooed on his right arm. He had Fidel Castro tattooed on his left leg. He called Castro “my second father” and dedicated his autobiography to him. He traveled to Venezuela to embrace Chavez at the presidential palace. At the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, coaching Argentina for the last time, he had his team display a banner on the pitch calling for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. He said the World Cup had been stolen from the people who loved fútbol and given to corporations and politicians. He was right then and he would be unsurprised today.
In 1986, playing against England four years after Argentina’s defeat in the Malvinas war — a conflict that killed approximately 900 people, most of them young Argentine conscripts, Maradona scored a goal with his hand and was not penalized. He said afterward it was scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” He later clarified what he had really been thinking: “We knew that a lot of Argentine kids had died there, that they had killed them like little birds.” It was a goal but more importantly an act of political defiance against an imperial power.
Messi was born on June 24, 1987, in Rosario, Argentina. His father was a foreman at a pressed steel plant. His mother worked in a manufacturing workshop. He left for Barcelona at 13 when FC Barcelona offered to pay for the growth hormone treatment his family could not afford in Argentina. He became the greatest player of his generation — Maradona’s own verdict confirmed it. He is also, in political terms, essentially blank. He has never said anything about anything that matters beyond the game. He has never called anyone human garbage. He has never boarded a train full of protesters. He has never had a revolutionary’s face tattooed on his body.
On March 5, 2026, Messi walked into the East Room of the White House, handed Donald Trump a pink Inter Miami ball, and accepted the president’s congratulations on winning the MLS Cup. Trump said: “It’s my distinct privilege to say what no American president has ever had the chance to say before: ‘Welcome to the White House, Lionel Messi.’” Fourteen months earlier, Messi had declined President Biden’s invitation to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing schedule conflicts. He found no such conflict this time.
This is not simply a story of two men who chose differently. Messi’s working-class origins were not so different from Maradona’s. The difference is what happened next. Maradona stayed inside Argentine fútboll into his twenties, in a culture saturated with the politics of a nation living through dictatorship and its aftermath, before the world’s biggest stages ever found him. Messi left for Barcelona at thirteen, extracted from working-class Rosario before any political consciousness could fully form, and was rebuilt inside La Masia — an elite academy engineered to produce footballers, not citizens. He came of age entirely inside the most financialized, brand-managed era the sport has ever known, a system perfected precisely to manufacture players who would never alienate the market. Maradona’s class consciousness survived because the fútbol culture that raised him carried it forward. Messi’s was engineered out of him by the very machine that made him great. He was not born without politics — he was made that way.
None of this makes Messi a villain. The contrast between Maradona and Messi is not about talent. Messi is a genius — Maradona said so himself. It is also not about morality. Both are human and complicated. It is about whose side you are on. Because we must all pick a side.
On June 18, 2026, two days after Gianni Infantino watched Messi score three goals at Arrowhead Stadium, the country Maradona loved more than any other outside his own faced the same imperial pressure that had crushed Argentina decades before. That day, Cuban lawmakers unanimously approved what economists described as the most profound transformation of the country’s economic system since the revolution. Foreign investors would no longer be required to form joint ventures with the state. Both Cuban and foreign investors would be allowed to acquire stakes in state companies. Private banks would enter Cuba’s once state-dominated finance sector. The measures came after the Trump administration cut off Cuba’s oil supply in January — following the US military operation that removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela — reducing the island’s fuel imports by an estimated 90 percent, producing nationwide blackouts of ten to twenty hours daily. Trump had said the United States would be “taking over” Cuba “almost immediately.” He had mused about an aircraft carrier stopping just outside Cuban waters. There is no appeasing fascists. The Cubans, of all people, know this. They have known it for sixty years.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo marched in 1977 and 1978 while Henry Kissinger praised the junta that was throwing their children from airplanes. Nearly fifty years later, the same imperial logic — applied through oil blockades and military threats — produced the privatization of the revolution Maradona loved. But the imperial logic that crushed Cuba and silenced Argentina has never gone unanswered. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo answered it by marching every Thursday for nearly fifty years. They were not politicians. They were ordinary people who refused to disappear along with their children. That tradition of refusal does not belong only to Argentina. It surfaces wherever ordinary people decide, without permission and without guarantee of safety, that our elites do not get to define what is possible.
Forty miles from Arrowhead Stadium, in Lawrence, Kansas — a college town of 96,000 people better known for the University of Kansas than for international fútbol — something happened this June that no algorithm can price. When the Algerian men’s national team arrived the first weekend of June to begin their World Cup preparations, Lawrence showed up. The city had been preparing for over a year. Local restaurants updated their menus with halal-friendly options. Residents arrived at open practice sessions waving Algerian flags and wearing team scarves. Lawrence artist Stan Herd — known for his large-scale earthworks — created a giant Algerian flag made from organic materials on the grounds of the University of Kansas. The University of Kansas marching band learned and performed the Algerian national anthem as the crowd stood in reverence. The Spencer Museum of Art at KU opened an exhibition titled “Welcoming the World to Lawrence,” drawing from its permanent collection to celebrate the nations represented in the tournament.
The story of Lawrence and Algeria made headlines internationally — on Good Morning America, and across the Arab world — because it was the story of a small American city choosing, in the face of a federal government conducting immigration raids and threatening military action against Muslim-majority nations, to offer genuine and unconditional welcome. This is what Maradona recognized in every city he played in — it was another moment when the game belongs to the people. Lawrence chose to keep going. Azucena Villaflor told the Mothers before she was taken: “Even if I’m not around, keep going.” They kept going. For nearly fifty years they kept going. The junta fell. Kissinger died. Videla died. The march continued.
Maradona was not the first athlete to turn a stadium into a stage for defiance. Jesse Owens did it in 1936, winning four gold medals in track and field at the Berlin Olympics with Adolf Hitler in the stands, watching the Games he had built to prove Aryan supremacy. Muhammad Ali did it in 1967, refusing induction into the US Army during the Vietnam War and declaring he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong — a decision that cost him his title, his boxing license, and three and a half years of his prime. Tommie Smith and John Carlos did it in 1968, raising black-gloved fists on the Olympic medal stand in Mexico City, and were suspended from the team and sent home under death threat for it. None of them were rewarded. All of them were right. Maradona belongs to that lineage. And even in the face of crass commercialization, fútbol still belongs to the people.