Diego Maradona

[Maradona37]

Absolutely.
Being born and raised in a small town in the communist Poland, there wasn't much else to do...but, on the other hand, when I think about it, it was a precious thing to have. Fresh air, friends, adrenaline, active life...hardly anyone was overweight or depressed.

Yeah exactly, it was a precious time. Lots of people out in the fresh air and constantly active, less weight problems and less depression.

This is now tying into my discussion of the world probably being worse since the internet and new information technologies have been invented or become ubiquitous, despite the vast advantages they confer too. I wish we could go back sometimes.

 

[Don Juan Laporta Estruch]

To be fair, Maradona wouldn't have survived here for too long. He had feuds with the coaches, the president, brawls with Bilbao and then there was his personal life too. They even had to change the training hours to accommodate his sleep schedule. He said that he started to use cocaine while in Barcelona. His numbers here were good but he was very problematic for the club.

I think selling Ronaldo was a bigger mistake, since he had one of the best individual seasons in football history and was only entering his prime being 19-20 years old.

"I was going to sign a contract renewal at the end of the season and I went to the Brazilian national team."

"Five days later, they (Barcelona) called me to tell me that the renewal cannot be done. It was never in my hands. I wanted to stay."

"If the club didn't value me the way I thought it should, then the decision was not in my hands. I would have liked to have stayed, but it didn't depend on me", says Ronaldo.

Some of his teammates were also surprised by his sale, guess something happened with the board.

Yes I agree. I knew Diego had many demons when at Barca, but I felt that when you have a player like that, so so special, you have to break your back to try and make it work for him. And we definitely did not do that. We discarded him as easy as we discarded a 30 year old Deco.

He went on to Napoli and they made it work for him, despite him having the same demons. So there is no reason he couldn't have been as good for us as he was with Napoli if we persevered with him, but the fact is we didn't think he was worth the trouble, which was a HUGE mistake.

The R9 sale was absolutely unforgivable though. Maybe the worst transfer sale of all time.