Even in death, Diego Maradona continued to torment the peculiar empire-nostalgic milieu that is conservative England. The scars of Mexico ’86 have clearly still not healed. The Times painted a portrait of a “self-obsessed” and “self-destructive” figure whose “rare gifts were ruined by self-indulgence,” with paternalism dripping from the page: “That such a supreme talent could be so undisciplined, that he felt he needed to cheat … was perhaps a pointer to the unhappy times ahead.” The Telegraph obituary could wait no longer than the end of the first sentence to denounce him “a liar, a cheat and an egomaniac,” concluding that whatever about his talents, “ultimately Maradona remained a boy from the barrios.”

This was not meant as a compliment, and the snobbish tones were nothing new to British media depictions of Maradona. In contrast to Latin American perspectives of “one of the most intelligent and astute beings to have graced the game,” for example, a 1994 BBC television report asserted that “the background provides one clue to the flawed make-up: Maradona, the fifth of eight children brought up in a Buenos Aires working class slum, never received an education that would remotely prepare him” for his life ahead.

Peter Shilton, the England goalkeeper turned Nigel Farage supporter who Maradona humiliated on that famous day in the Estadio Atzeca, wasted little time cashing in on his death with a column in the Daily Mail. Shilton’s post-mortem dusted off the same broken record he has been spinning for years in his parasite punditry on Maradona’s travails: “what I don’t like is that he never apologized. Never at any stage did he say he had cheated and that he would like to say sorry. Instead, he used his “Hand of God” line. That wasn’t right.”

This brand of moralizing speaks to more than simply the bitter whining of reactionary newspapers or aggrieved footballers. It conjures up the myth of a civilizing mission in which the colonial gentlemen made the rules for natives to adhere to for their own betterment. When the civilizers bypass or re-write the rules themselves, they are the wiser judges. When the natives defy the rules, they are uncivil and impudent, and deserve their comeuppance.

This was Maradona’s unforgivable offence: surviving England’s own violent disregard for “the rules,” before overthrowing them with those two sublime, otherworldly goals—la mano di dios, and then, just moments later, barrilete cósmico. The European empires were built on a duplicitous combination of brute force and rule of law. Maradona eclipsed both that day. For little England, this remains unpalatable. More than thirty years later, it continues to drive some of their players from that team deeper into conspiracy theory territory.

For the peripheries and proletarians of the world—most of the world—however, Maradona is a symbol of defiance against the football aristocracy, against the corporate bosses, against empire itself. What he did to England on the pitch and what he represented in his refusal to be co-opted spoke to so many not merely in Argentina and the Americas but across the colonized and postcolonial world. As one comment captured it, the magic of Maradona “is having taught us in many different ways, from Argentina to Naples, that the periphery can win.”

The tributes flowed in after his death, from Syria and South Africa to Iran, India, and Ireland. He is an “icon not just of football but of the barrio poor.” He is a working class “subaltern hero.” He is “for the people of South America what Muhammad Ali was for Black America.” He is ‘the Malcolm X of those people’ racialized as Black in Argentina: “anyone with slightly darker skin because of their Indigenous or Afro-Argentinian ancestry.” He is a “comrade of the global South.” He is an example of Thomas Sankara’s vision of nonconformity as revolutionary courage. He is a Bolivarian “idol of the masses” in their struggle against neo-colonialism.

Such a worldly weight of expectation and cult of personality is clearly more than any one person could ever live up to. Maradona was not a political leader, and never claimed to be. He was under no illusions that “by winning the World Cup, we didn’t change the world, we didn’t bring down the price of bread.” But he was a political icon and symbol—one created and imagined as something far loftier than the reality of one footballing man could be, but one nonetheless that had very real meaning for many.

We know all too well the toll that Maradona’s addictions took on him. He was undoubtedly a victim of his combined vulnerabilities and surroundings; his own exploits and the exploitation of him. As his team-mate Jorge Valdano reminds us, he was also granted impunity from an early age. Like too many other football men, Maradona was neglectful and abusive towards some of those closest to him. While we cannot judge him without also judging the patriarchal society and consumption cultures that enabled him, there are some abuses that no context can justify. The allegation of violence against his girlfriend Roció Oliva cannot be reconciled or excised from his broader legacy.

Appearing in many of the obituaries was the famous line from his trainer Fernando Signorini that there were two people: wonderful, insecure Diego, who Signorini would go to the end of the world for; and Maradona, the scarecrow character who he wouldn’t take one step with (though most fail to mention what Diego said to Signorini in response: “yes, but if it wasn’t for Maradona I would still be in Villa Fiorito”). With a figure as operatic as Maradona, these tropes of duality resonate neatly—angel and devil, hero and villain, genius and cheat, maestro and mess. But ultimately they are both over-inclusive and overly reductive. He was one complex person with many, many layers, and his was a “lifetime of struggle” with all of its Dionysian excess and tragedy amplified.