Rohan Daft lets slip a never-before-told story about the world’s greatest footballer and Pantofola d'Oro, the very special hand-made football boots that are the latest addition to the Archibald collection.
As not worn by the best footballer in the world. Not officially, anyway...
The first the world saw of Diego Maradona was at the Copa Mundial in Spain in 1982. Here was the golden boy, El Pibe de Oro, the twenty-one-year-old from Boca Juniors who, just nine days before Argentina’s opening game in the competition against Belgium, had signed for the Catalan grandees Barcelona for a world-record £5m fee. He stood a squat 1.65m tall, a mightily built muchacho, with a mop of black hair on his head and magic in his size 39 feet, on which he famously wore Puma King Torero boots.
Puma’s scouts recognised Maradona’s marketing potential at exactly the same time that Barcelona noticed that he had what it takes to make it to the top. That’s the way it works in football: boot manufacturers move very quickly to get the next best player in the world to wear their boots. The details of Maradona’s deal with Puma have never been made public, but Nike’s $1 billion lifetime deal with Ronaldo demonstrates that such deals amount to very big business.
Save for a brief dalliance with Mizuno for his sad swansong with Boca in 1995, Maradona wore Puma boots throughout his career, which also took in two more World Cups, a total of 91 appearances for Argentina and spells of varying success at Napoli, Sevilla and Newell’s Old Boys. Outwardly, at least, because at Napoli things weren’t exactly what they seemed.
Maradona signed for Napoli for a new world record fee of £6.9 million in July 1984. He had flickered brilliantly at Barcelona, but had also made a name for himself as something of a nightlife-loving renegade, which might have had something to do with his choice of destination. According to Asif Kapadia, the director of Diego Maradona, the must-see new documentary that looks at El Pibe’s seven years in the Mediterranean city, “Naples and Maradona were made for each other. It was both the best and worst place for him.” Naples was the hard-partying home of the Camorra crime syndicate and one of the most impoverished cities in Europe. Its football team was very much the poor cousin of the northern powerhouses like Inter, AC Milan and Juventus and had never won a league title. Indeed, the season before Maradona arrived, Napoli had only just avoided relegation. Maradona was the Messiah.
Napoli was a close-knit club and everyone there knew and liked Gaetano Masturzo, the avuncular warehouse manager. Maradona soon became friends with him and asked him how he could get some Napoli shirts for his friends and relatives. Masturzo put him on to his friend Nicola Raccuglia, who was running NR, the brand that made Napoli’s shirts. Raccuglia met Maradona, handed over some shirts, and told him about something else he thought he might be interested in for himself, something that would ultimately have a hand (or foot…) in changing the history of Napoli forever: Pantofola d’Oro, the golden slippers.
Pantofola d’Oro football boots have been made by hand in Campoli in Italy since the 1950s. They were dubbed the golden slippers by John Charles, the so-called Gentle Giant from Wales, who shone for Juventus from 1957 until 1962. Brazilian legends Pele and Garincha have also worn them. And many more top players would surely be wearing them now if the likes of Puma weren’t throwing money at them. Maradona was intrigued and visited the factory in Campoli. He tried a few pairs of boots on, found that they fitted and felt like no other boots he had worn and quickly decided that he had to have a pair. So the head bootmaker made a mould of Maradona’s famed feet and hand crafted him a pair of beautiful bespoke kangaroo leather boots in black. In black, but with a distinct white Puma formstrip logo on the side so everyone thought Maradona was wearing the boots of his official supplier. Pantofola d’Oro for El Pibe de Oro: golden slippers for the golden boy.
Maradona loved his secret Pantofola d’Oro boots and wore them when leading Napoli to what remain its only Scudetto league titles in 1987 and 1990, a feat for which he will forever be worshipped in the city. Just don’t tell Puma.
