New Maradona

New Maradona or New Diego was a title given by the press and public to promising Argentine football players in reference (and reverence) to Diego Maradona as a benchmark. Since Maradona retired, fans had been anticipating someone to lead the Argentina national team to a World Cup final, like Maradona did in 1986 and 1990. As a consequence, very talented youngsters were quickly labeled as the New Maradona. Originally it was Diego Latorre who was said to be the New Maradona. Since then a number of top draw Argentine footballers have been slated as the New Maradona. The likes of Ariel Ortega, Pablo Aimar, Gabriel Omar Batistuta and Javier Pedro Saviola all had been said to be the “New Maradona” early on in their career. But none of them could live up to the expectations.

In recent years, Atletico Madrid’s Sergio Aguero and FC Barcelona’s Lionel Messi have been labeled as the “New Maradona”.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.