The recently deceased Argentine soccer player received a brutal tackle in September 1983 that broke his left ankle.
Diego Armando Maradona passed away last week at the age of 60. A total footballer remembered intergenerationally, he had hardly any injuries during his soccer career. However, in September 1983, 37 years ago now, when Barça was playing against Athletic Club at Camp Nou and the score was two goals to zero in favor of the azulgranas, the Argentinean star received a savage tackle from behind by the recidivist center-back Andoni Goikoetxea.
Dr. De la Varga analyzes Maradona’s ankle injury at Videos
The result, a broken ankle of the left leg. As such, the diagnosis was a fracture of the external peroneal malleolus of the ankle, with tearing of the internal ligament. The same night of the injury, the Argentine was operated on by FC Barcelona’s medical services. An osteosynthesis of the fracture was performed with a screwed plate and reconstruction of the torn ligament.
The recovery, given the trauma procedures of the time, was expected to be a period of immobilization of the long leg, followed by a tough rehabilitation: in total, between four and six months in the dry dock.
He returned to Buenos Aires to recuperate at home, and fate smiled on him by placing him in the hands of Dr. Rubén Oliva, an orthopedic surgeon of the Argentine national team and a doctor ahead of his time. He used with Maradona – and against the opinion of the doctors of the Barcelona Football Club – the new principles of functional recovery, which are nowadays used to treat sports injuries. Thanks to these principles, immobilization and unloading times are greatly shortened, resulting in a much faster recovery.
The player reappeared three and a half months after the injury, scoring two goals in a match against Sevilla. At that time, the normal recovery period for this type of injury was about six months.
A recovery ahead of his time
However, we have not reached the end of the story. El Pelusa was left with discomfort in his ankle, discomfort that prevented him from performing and playing the ball as he wanted. He ended his time at Barcelona without a great career, winning one Copa del Rey and one Copa de la Liga in the two years he played for Barça.
He traveled halfway around the world consulting the most famous ankle specialists in the hope of putting an end to the pain, but the answer was always the same: “Diego, you’ll have to get used to playing with that pain”. However, Fernando Signorini, hired as Maradona’s personal physical trainer at a time when professional clubs did not have physical trainers, appeared in Naples.
Signorini completely changed the biomechanics of Maradona’s left foot: his way of striking, his way of supporting his foot or turning his hip… And the ball went back to where he wanted it to go. From then on, we saw the best Maradona: the winner of two Scudettos with Napoli and the winner of the World Cup with Argentina in Mexico ’86, the World Cup of the famous “hand of God”. Subsequently, his decline began, although it was closely related to drug use.
As Pep Guardiola recently said when remembering Maradona, the epitaph that would best fit his grave is a phrase painted on an Argentine flag carried by people waiting to visit his funeral chapel: “It doesn’t matter what you did in your life, but what you did in ours. Rest in peace, Diego.
Dr. Vicente de la Varga is a traumatologist and orthopedic surgeon at CAMDE, Malaga.