Killing Maradona

I’ll admit: I approached *Killing Maradona* as a football fan expecting a tragic hero’s tale, maybe with some juicy tabloid detours. What I got instead was a gut-punch of a book that feels less like a biography and more like a true-crime exposé where the victim and the perpetrator are the same person. John Sackville’s narration is the secret weapon here—his RP accent lends an air of gravitas, but it’s the way he *modulates* that sells it. When recounting Maradona’s on-pitch triumphs, his voice lifts with something like reluctant awe; when detailing the sordid dealings with drug lords or the FBI’s half-hearted interventions, he sounds like a man reading a file he’d rather incinerate. The production is impeccable, though I’ll dock it half a point for the occasional overuse of dramatic pauses during the book’s darker sections—it’s effective the first time, but by hour eight, it starts to feel like emotional manipulation. The book’s structure is its greatest strength and its one real flaw. Arrowsmith’s decision to weave together Maradona’s personal unraveling with the geopolitical underbelly of 80s/90s football is masterful, but the timeline jumps can be jarring in audiobook form. A chapter on his 1986 glory might abruptly cut to a 1991 drug bust, and without visual cues, it’s easy to lose your footing. That said, the payoff is worth it: by the final hours, as Sackville’s voice grows wearier and the stories more grotesque (the section on Maradona’s "managed" overdoses is particularly harrowing), you’re left with a portrait not of a fallen idol, but of an industry that *requires* fallen idols to function. If you’re looking for nostalgia or redemption, look elsewhere. But if you want to understand how talent becomes currency—and how that currency gets laundered through blood, powder, and backroom handshakes—this is as gripping as it is grim.