New trial over football great Maradona’s death begins in Argentina

Diego Maradona was lauded as one of the greatest and most iconic players to ever grace a football pitch [File: Javier Soriano/AFP]

A new trial over the death of Argentinian football legend Diego Maradona will begin on Tuesday, a year after a scandal involving a judge caused the first trial to collapse.

Maradona, considered one of the world’s greatest players ever, died in November 2020 at the age of 60 while recovering from brain surgery at a private residence.

He died of heart failure and acute pulmonary edema – a condition where fluid accumulates in the lungs – two weeks after undergoing surgery.

The new trial, which will hear from some 120 witnesses, will again seek to determine if Maradona’s medical team was responsible for his death.

Seven members of his medical team were charged with negligent homicide in a trial that began on March 11. The defendants have denied the charges of “simple homicide with eventual intent” in Maradona’s treatment. They were facing prison sentences of between eight and 25 years.

The medical team was indicted over the conditions of his convalescence, described by prosecutors as grossly negligent, in the northern Buenos Aires suburb of Tigre.

But two and a half months into their trial, after hours of sometimes tearful testimony from witnesses, including Maradona’s children, the proceedings came to a halt.

The trial was annulled in May 2025 after it emerged that one of the judges overseeing the trial, Julieta Makintach, was involved in a documentary in the corridors of the Buenos Aires court and in her office, which breached judicial rules. She was later impeached.

The defence maintains the larger-than-life Maradona, who battled cocaine and alcohol addictions, died of natural causes.

The trial is expected to last until July.

News of the death of the 1986 World Cup champion brought hundreds of thousands of Argentines onto the streets in mourning in the midst of the COVID pandemic.

Lauded as one of the greatest and most iconic players to ever grace a football pitch, Maradona struggled with drug addiction for many years and with connections to the Naples underworld in his time there.

His performance in the 1986 World Cup tournament has since become a sporting legend. He dubbed his controversial first goal in a quarterfinal the “Hand of God”, since it led to an Argentinian victory over England – a rival with whom the country had four years previously fought a war over the Falkland Islands, known as the Islas Malvinas in Spanish.

But Maradona’s second goal in that match, which saw him shimmy past several England opponents from his own half to score the decisive second, was sublime.

In 2000, the football governing body Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) named Maradona one of its two “Players of the Century”, alongside Brazil’s Pele.