'It Is Maradona's Responsibility': The Trial and the Fracture in Sports Medicine

Hook

On a morning in Buenos Aires, inside the courtroom, a clinical physician named José Antonio Maya took the witness stand and said something that made the room hold its breath: "It is Maradona's responsibility." He was not talking about a missed shot. He was not talking about a wrong substitution. He was talking about the death of Diego Armando Maradona — the 60-year-old who died on November 25, 2026, in Tigre, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, after surgery for a subdural hematoma.

In 35 years in this profession, I have covered thousands of press conferences and watched more than once as an athlete is lifted onto an altar and dragged through the mud in a single night. But this is the first time I have seen a legend — a dead man — turned into a defendant in the very trial about his own death. Maya's sentence was not merely testimony. It was a carefully constructed logical trap, and if we fail to see it, we will lose the biggest lesson sports medicine needs to learn.

Context

To understand what is happening in that room, you need to know who sits where, and why.

Leopoldo Luque — Maradona's personal physician — is the central defendant. José Antonio Maya was called as an expert witness to defend Luque. Standing alongside the accused group is Pedro Di Spagna, a clinical physician contracted by Swiss Medical, and Luciano Spena — a nutritionist Maradona had previously dismissed.

On the opposite side, prosecutor Patricio Ferrari cites the conclusion of the scientific police board: Maradona's medical care was "inadequate, deficient and reckless." The board asserted that warning signs were ignored.

And here is the pivot of the whole affair: on November 18, 2026, exactly one week before Maradona died, he dismissed his entire care team. He refused to let Di Spagna examine him despite a swollen leg. He was described as a "difficult patient." Maya builds his entire argument on these details, claiming Maradona "felt well enough not to give a doctor the opportunity to act."

Sound familiar? This is the argument I have seen in sport for decades: the star decides for himself, and when everything collapses, the system stands outside. But this time, the system is not outside. It is sitting in the courtroom, and the first thing it does is point at a man who is already lying down.

I witnessed something similar on a much smaller scale in 2026, when PSG triggered Neymar's 222-million-euro release clause. Back then I wrote that this was not merely a purchase; it was the fracture of an entire football ecosystem. Now, in Buenos Aires, I see another fracture: the crack between a patient's right to autonomy and a physician's duty that cannot be relinquished.

Core

The first thing to do is separate the medical layer from the emotional layer.

The central legal question is not "was Maradona difficult," but "did the physicians breach their duty of care." Here lies an evidential contradiction that cannot be blurred: the scientific police board concluded the signs were ignored, while Maya argues that an examination required the patient's cooperation. The two sides stand on two different medical standards, and the outcome depends on which one the court credits.

More striking still is a document signed by Maya himself. Prosecutor Ferrari uses it against the defense: in it, Maya wrote that the trunk edema was "the only sign that doctors should have noticed." Then, before the court, he himself conceded that waiting several days in such a situation is "not good medical practice." That admission weakens the very autonomy argument the defense is constructing.

But there is a point both sides avoid: the structure of the care team. Three separate providers — personal physician, contracted clinician, nutritionist — operating in parallel, with no one holding overall responsibility. All three were dismissed a week before the patient died. In any sports-medicine governance model I have observed, this is not an individual's mishap. It is a systemic failure. A patient can refuse to be examined. But a system cannot refuse to document, monitor, and remain continuously accountable — and that is the thing nobody in the courtroom wants to say out loud.

I watched Maradona play from 2026 to 2026. I saw an extraordinary yet fragile body, a soul that needed protection from itself. And I saw how football built around him a world in which he was always right, even when his body sent the clearest signals. From the cocaine-linked dilated cardiomyopathy recorded in 2026 — later revised diagnostically — to the successive hospitalizations, Maradona lived inside a medical grey zone no one dared to touch.

There is a detail buried beneath the sensational headlines: the dispute over whether Maradona had heart disease at all. The defense tries to break the causal chain between medical error and death by insisting he had no heart condition. This is the classic strategy in any negligence case: if you cannot deny the carelessness, deny that the carelessness caused the outcome. But it collides with a fatal paradox — because Maya's own admission that "waiting several days was not good practice" establishes that there was a sign requiring intervention, regardless of the underlying diagnosis.

Contrarian

And here is where I might be wrong, so I will say it plainly.

The defense has a legitimate point in medical ethics: patient autonomy is a principle that cannot be casually swept aside. If Maradona — a competent adult — refused to be examined, the boundary of responsibility does shift. Those who oppose me often ask: "So you think doctors should tie the patient down to examine him?" No. But between "tying the patient down" and "letting the patient go" lies an enormous distance, and that distance is precisely where protocols, records and second opinions should exist.

The biggest blind spot of both the trial and public opinion is using Maradona's exceptional case to conclude something about individual responsibility. A global star surrounded by assistants, family, lawyers and fans is never a "normal patient." If the sports-medicine system cannot design mechanisms for such abnormal people, then the death is not one person's fault. It is the product of a structure nobody wants to change.

I know I am going against the crowd's emotion. But across my career, I have learned that the only way to keep credibility is to dare to say what nobody wants to hear — and to say it with evidence, not with outrage.

Takeaway

I was not in that courtroom, and I will not deliver the verdict in its place.

If there is one thing I learned after 2026 — the year the stadiums fell silent and I learned to listen to football with my heart when the crowd was gone — it is this: sport only grows up when it agrees to design systems, not merely to sign contracts.

My testable prediction: if the court accepts the patient-autonomy argument as a central mitigating factor, federations and clubs will be forced to standardize medical documentation and mandate second opinions for high-risk athletes within 6 to 18 months of the ruling.

And if I am wrong? Then remember that there was a woman who once said one small thing; people laughed. Five years later, they repeated it.