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Diego Maradona is an Argentinian soccer player who is generally regarded as the top footballer of the 1980s and one of the greatest of all time. he was renowned for his ability to control the ball and create scoring opportunities for himself and others, he led club teams to championships in Argentina, Italy, and Spain, and he starred on the Argentine national team that won the 1986 World Cup.

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Maradona began taking cocaine in the mid-1980s, developing an addiction to both that and alcohol which would last until 2004. Whilst playing for Barcelona in 1982, it grew worse thanks to his mafia connections in Napoli, where he moved in 1984. Maradona’s first serious punishments over his drug use came in 1991 when he was banned for 15 months by Napoli for testing positive for cocaine – this lasted from April 1991 – June 1992.

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While playing for Napoli, he followed this “physical program,” as reported by the Independent:

Sunday: Serie A match.

Sunday night to Wednesday morning: Continuous cocaine binge.

Wednesday morning to Saturday evening: ‘Cleanse,’ and sweat it all out.

Sunday: Serie A match.

Maradona repeated this routine at the height of his career until he couldn’t keep it a secret anymore and the physical toll became too much on his body. Maradona, normally fit as one would picture a star athlete, gained weight, looked bloated and developed a double chin. His physical transformation was so noticeable that even his kids couldn’t recognize him after he returned home from a wild night out, the Independent reported in 2019.

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In the 1994 World Cup, Maradona scored a clutch goal in Argentina’s 4-0 win against Greece during the group stage round. Nine days later, just before the team’s final group stage match, Maradona tested positive for ephedrine and was sent home. Maradona was again banned from FIFA, and he never represented Argentina’s National Team, La Albiceleste, again.

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While on vacation in Punta de Lesta, Uruguay, in 2000, Maradona was transported to Cantegirl Sanatorium after being diagnosed with “hypertensive crises and ventricular arrhythmia,” the effects of a cocaine overdose, Vice reported in 2017.

According to Vice, Jorge Romero, the doctor who responded to Maradona at the vacation home where he was staying, told the El Pais, “When I arrived, they rushed me inside. I found not Maradona, but a man who was dying. He was in a coma, laid out in a chair, surrounded by people who didn’t really have any idea what to do.”

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Fernando Signorini, Maradona's personal trainer throughout the years, reveals: He started talking more about the subject of how drugs affected him.
'I remember one day he said to me: "You've no idea how hard I'm trying to quit, Fer. But I can't." I even told a friend "he's nearing the end", but I didn't think it was going to be so fast,' he said.
'Had Diego Maradona been born into another time he would have been treated differently. He would not only have survived but he would have played many more games.'

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In his final years Maradona was simply holding on. The superstar had little option but to undergo a second course of gastric bypass surgery in 2015, ten years on from his first procedure, to relieve the strain of obesity on his heart.
Yet this procedure had a huge down-side, as sports cardiologist Sharma explains.
'If we're talking about a chap like Maradona who had used cocaine for over 22 years, this prolonged increase in heart rate for a long, long time in his life would have resulted in his heart becoming very weak and in those sort of people, the loss in nutrition that goes hand in hand with bariatric surgery may have accelerated his heart failure and death.'