During World Cup 2026, Venerate the Madonna, Not Maradona

According to no less an authority than Pope (and former amateur goalkeeper) John Paul II, “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.” By “football” here, the pope meant what Americans call soccer, a sport currently being played out to mass global audiences in the ongoing FIFA World Cup 2026, held jointly across the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

This literal Keeper of the Faith encountered several fellow footballers during his time in office, most memorably the squat but mesmeric Argentine attacker Diego Armando Maradona, arguably the best soccer star of all time. When the pair met in Rome in 1987, Maradona left unimpressed, accusing the pontiff of showing him “a total lack of respect” by gifting him only an ordinary blessed rosary rather than a special custom-made one reflecting his own divine status in the game. Offended, Maradona drifted away from the faith of his childhood, later sourly summing up his papal audience like so:

I’ve been to the Vatican and seen the gold ceilings. And then I hear the Pope saying that the Church was concerned about poor kids. So? Sell the ceilings, mate! You’ve got nothing going for you. You were only a goalkeeper.

Who did Maradona think he was here? Jesus Christ? No, but several of his most fanatical fan base did. Which is why, in 1998, a year after he formally retired from playing, three fans got together and officially founded a synthetic pseudo-Catholic sect—Iglesia Maradoniana, or the Maradonian Church—devoted to worshipping the man. Catholics are supposed to revere the Madonna, not the Maradona, but the cult’s acolytes feel quite differently.

Sacred Goals

When playing for Argentina and top European clubs like Barcelona and Napoli—at first brilliantly but later appallingly due to the copious amounts of illegal drugs he ended up ingesting on a daily basis—Maradona wore the number 10 jersey of the team’s playmaker, the position which made the team tick. The Maradonian Church, playing on the Spanish word for God being “Dios,” exploited this to have its priests and worshippers wear a replica Argentina national team shirt during masses. The back number was altered to read “D10S,” indicating how their blessed “D,” Diego, is more of a God to them than God Himself is.

Diego first became a deity to them in 1986, when the FIFA World Cup was held in Mexico. In the tournament’s quarterfinals, Argentina met their fiercest European rivals, England, to whom the nation had not long ago lost the Falklands War, in 1982. Argentina won 2-1, thanks to two goals from Maradona—one a seemingly impossible, slalom-like dribble past half the English team, the other a clearly illegal act of handball, where he punched the ball into the back of the net. Blinded by Maradona’s effulgent halo, however, the referee did not notice this fact and ruled the goal should stand. When later asked to explain his actions, Maradona shrugged and said it must have been “the Hand of God,” lending victory to the nation as revenge for their defeat in the Falklands. Argentina then went on to lift the World Cup trophy outright.

When his fellow Argentine Pope Francis became pope in 2013, Maradona returned to Catholicism’s bosom. Raised in hard circumstances and being close friends with Latin Marxists like Fidel Castro, the footballer came from a Liberation Theology-type background, viewing Catholicism simplistically as a mere means of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor, an idea some critics complain Francis himself shared. Therefore, when in 2014 the Vatican organized a charity soccer match, Diego agreed to make a special on-field comeback, saying:

Everybody in Argentina can remember “the Hand of God” in the England match in the 1986 World Cup. Now, in my country, the “Hand of God” has brought us an Argentinian pope. Pope Francis is even bigger than Maradona. We should all imitate Pope Francis. If each one of us gives something to someone else, no one in the world would be starving.

Is that really the true historical lesson to be drawn from Maradona’s beloved Marxism? Someone should ask all the victims of Stalin’s, Mengistu’s, and Mao’s politically engineered famines.

Hail Mary Pass

Two years later, Francis granted his countryman a private audience, the footballer crediting this with facilitating his return to the Holy Roman Church. Perhaps this time, unlike with John Paul II, Pope Francis had been wise enough to gift him his own special custom rosary set. 

Equally wise were members of the Maradonian Church, whose rituals specifically involve a modified form of the rosary, with 34 separate prayer beads in honor of the 34 goals Diego scored for Argentina over the course of his playing career. As this suggests, the whole cult is high kitsch and comes across as something of a parody. The church has its own sacred calendar, dating year zero back to Maradona’s birth year of 1960, thus placing us in A.D. (Anno Diego) 66 right now.

Bizarre Maradonian ceremonies exist for weddings (bride and groom publicly “consummate” their union by one symbolically kicking a ball into the other’s goalmouth) and baptisms (the adult initiate is thrown a ball, which they must hit with their fist in imitation of D10S’ illegal 1986 World Cup goal). Imitation religious paraphernalia—like a bloodstained soccer ball entwined with barbed-wire as a spherical crown of thorns—are likewise made use of. There are also fake liturgies and prayers, like these two, modeled on the Lord’s Prayer and Ave Maria respectively:

Our Diego, who art on Earth,
Hallowed be thy left foot,
Thy magic be done,
May we remember your goals,
On Earth as it is in Heaven.

Hail the ball.
You are full of magic,
Diego is with you.
Blessed are you among all others,
And blessed is Diego who does not let you be tarnished.
Holy ball, mother of goals,
Pray for us players,
Now and at the hour of our meeting…
Diego!

The church even has its own ridiculous list of Ten Commandments:

1. The ball is never soiled.
2. Love football above all else.
3. Declare unconditional love for Diego and the beauty of football.
4. Defend the Argentina shirt.
5. Spread the news of Diego’s miracles throughout the universe.
6. Honour the temples [i.e., stadiums] where he played and his sacred shirts.
7. Don’t proclaim Diego as a member of any single team.
8. Preach and spread the principles of the Church of Maradona.
9. Make Diego your middle name.
10. Name your first son Diego.

At this point, most people would conclude the whole “religion” is just a total joke. That is certainly how it began when it was first conceived by some Argentine friends during the evening of October 30, 1998. Realizing it was the nativity of their national football savior, they wished his distant, immaterial presence a happy birthday—or a Happy Christmas, as they jestingly put it.

From 2001 onward, the friends began marking this pseudo-Christmas more formally, later adding a pseudo-Easter each June 22, the anniversary of his 1986 Hand of God game. This celebrates the player’s alleged subsequent death and rebirth: following his long sporting ban, after testing positive for drugs in 1994, and his later redemption in being allowed to start playing again. Here, converts are formally accepted by swearing fealty upon a copy of Maradona’s autobiography and eating a slice of his favorite food from his time in Italy: pizza. (Actually, his true favorite “food” from this time was cocaine; but publicly ingesting that at the altar may prove legally problematic.)    

Holy Fools

Unfortunately, initial prank though it may have been, once the cult gained publicity—and occasional endorsement from Maradona himself—some people began to take it all too seriously. Today, the church has branches not only in Argentina but also in Mexico, with offshoots in Italy. There are between 100,000 and 200,000 reported members worldwide; albeit the word “members” may just mean social media followers, the actual number of genuine, true believers presumably being rather smaller. According to one of the sect’s original joke founders, Alejandro Verón, he did not intend it to take off at all, saying, “I have a rational religion, and that’s the Catholic Church, and I have a religion cemented in my heart, passion, and that’s Diego Maradona.” That second use of the word “religion” there was intended purely figuratively.

Yet not everyone else is quite so rational as Verón. It has been noted how attendance at soccer matches in Argentina has been rising in parallel with falling Catholic church attendance. It has been theorized that the sport has taken on the emotional role of pseudo-faith—compensating for a loss of real faith—with Maradona fitting in ideally as its Christ figure. Actual academic studies have now been performed into the alleged faith, treating it as a legitimate full-blown syncretic outgrowth of Christianity, implausibly rationalizing that, during his almost supernaturally gifted performances on the pitch, Maradona gave audiences access to feelings of what the German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto famously called “the numinous,” or sensations of miraculous, indefinable awe.

Diego’s “divine gift” with the ball at his feet (or hand), made him into “a divinity incarnated in man to give meaning to earthly and immanent time,” we are told, lending Maradona a “prophetic charisma.” His return from his drugs ban has been compared to Christ’s return from His tomb—a “salvific, redemptive and liberating event,” an “announcement of redemption” for all mankind. Diego stood up against the oppressive FIFA technocrats who banned him like Jesus once did against the Pharisees who tried to “ban” Him likewise, purportedly. This is a genuine paragraph from one such paper:

On the football pitch, first and foremost, Maradona is always described as unpredictable, prodigious, brilliant, capable of winning almost single-handedly, overcoming ordinary barriers. He therefore symbolises an allegorical supremacy over the finite and mortal human condition [i.e., over death itself]. He acts in a superhuman way, creating a syntax of the impossible, almost contradicting human limitations. In doing so, he feeds the psychological impulse that drives people to seek in religion the overcoming of humanity’s boundaries and constraints.

Try writing a paper comparing Muhammad Ali to the actual Muhammad like that. Show it to some Muslims; see how far it gets you.     

Diego Te Absolvo

One newspaper account of a travelling church ceremony (it has no permanent buildings in Argentina, just a series of pop-up shops) contains descriptions of apparently sincerely received ceremonies like this:

The lights dim, and six men in white tunics walk up the aisle. Each member…has the great footballer’s number 10 on his back. Up front, an altar boy holds aloft a bloody football. It looks as if it has been tortured. Blood drips off its leather hexagons. Coils of barbed wire crown it. Behind the altar is a huge portrait of the man whom the crowd have come to worship—Diego Armando Maradona. The man behind me wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “The Pope [i.e., the former Cardinal Ratzinger] is German, but God is Argentine” and a stylised Maradona running at full speed, preceded by a football. The room is hot, sweaty and smells of beer—not surprising, as everyone has a glass in their hand. As we gather around a small stage that pays tribute to the glorious goals of the blessed Diego, men’s voices echo as they chant:

He was crucified, killed and tortured,
Suspended from the pitch,
They cut [off] his legs [by suspending him for drugs offenses],
But he returned and his magic spell was reborn.

A man begins to cry, the entire inside of his right arm covered by a tattoo spelling out DIEGO. He hugs his son, a boy of three or four who stares bug-eyed at a 2-metre-high wooden church that is at the centre of the stage. Inside stands a statue of you-know-who, head held high, hand over his heart. With the Argentina shirt on his chest and his foot planted atop a Puma[-brand] football, Maradona looks invincible.

But Maradona was not invincible—far from it. From 1982 onward, the scandal-ridden and increasingly bloated Diego was an avid cokehead, once memorably remarking, “I gave my opponents a big advantage due to my illness. Do you know the player I could have been if I hadn’t taken drugs?” Banned from entering several countries due to his convictions (criminal, not religious), Maradona was also a good friend of the Italian mafia and an avid frequenter of prostitutes—but not in the more innocent sense Jesus once was with Mary Magdalene.

So, perhaps it was no real surprise when, in 2020, the fallen idol finally died of heart failure at the relatively young age of only 60. Unlike the real Jesus Christ, however, he has singularly failed to yet return from the dead.