Pablo de Villota -- The importance of 'GOD' sometimes being told 'NO'.

The shock of Diego Armando Maradona's death has brought back memories of a day I shared with the Argentinean star, which left a deep impression on me for several reasons.

I seem to remember that it was in 2014, when as head of Formula 1 Sponsorship at Banco Santander, my colleague Rocío González and I organised an activity with the media, where they could share a few days of training with Fernando Alonso in Dubai, which was the place where the Asturian driver was preparing for the season.

I have great memories of those days, as it allowed me to get to know even better than I already knew, to what extent Fernando was a person absolutely focused on his profession, on taking care of his physical shape, his nutrition, his mental focus, etc.

However, those days brought us an unexpected surprise, because in a football match that we had prepared together with Michel Salgado, who was living in Dubai at the time, the Galician star promised us that he was going to complete the line-ups with professional footballers such as Alfonso and Salinas. As if it wasn't enough of a privilege for journalists to share a match or a team with Fernando and these phenomena, imagine the look on everyone's faces when Diego Maradona came out of the tunnel to take part in that match. As a well known English journalist enthusiastically told me 'The fucking Diego Maradona, playing football with me. Can't believe it!‘

Despite his obvious overweight and many years away from competition, you could see magic in every ball he touched, in how he made the difficult easy. In short, to contemplate someone who had a divine gift for playing football, like perhaps no one else in history has ever had.

It was inevitable that, having Fernando Alonso's absolute professionalism so much in mind during those days, many thoughts came to my mind about how much Maradona wasted his talent. If Maradona's application as a sportsman was not exemplary, for many he was the best footballer in history, it was hard to imagine what the Argentinean star could have given us, if he had been a professional really focused on his sport.

That day, he taught me several things and perhaps the most important of them all, the capital importance for an elite athlete of having people around him who know how to say no, people he trusts with the moral authority to bring him down to earth, people who, even at the risk of antagonising him, know how to tell the athlete the truth and not what he wants to hear.

Influenced no doubt by his succession of scandals and public outbursts, my personal opinion of Maradona was not very good. However, when you are fortunate enough, as I was, to get to know the person underneath the character, I was able to discover a fundamentally good person, someone very vulnerable, a surprisingly insecure person in need of constant attention and approval from those around him. This insecurity was really surprising, coming from someone capable of arousing the most unusual admiration with a simple movement of the foot, but it is a very common psychological problem, so similar to that of those top models who are close to bodily perfection but who, at the same time, feel insecure about their bodies.

There is no need to go into the details that led me to these conclusions, as they would make this article very long, but even if I make it clear that it was a simple personal perception, that one day together allowed me to open my eyes to the extent to which the court of 'palmeros' he had with him was harmful to Maradona's behaviour. I thought that if, so many years after his glory years, the 'pelusa' was burdened with such a harmful 'troupe', it was easy to imagine the damage that his personal environment must have done to him throughout his career. I thought about how harmful it was not to have a father, a brother, a cousin, a real friend, who thought first of all of his own good and not of the economic privileges and fame, which gave him a permanent thanks.

I have no doubt that this is a very common problem for many athletes when fame goes to their heads and they break up with family, partners or lifelong friends, but perhaps there are few cases as notorious and sad as Diego's, where we have seen so many times how his environment, far from protecting him, encouraged him to harm himself. Of course Diego is also guilty, perhaps the main culprit, but what interests me here is not to reflect on who is responsible and who is a victim, but to draw attention to the enormous responsibility of the athlete's most personal circle.

It is quite likely that, drunk with money and adulation, the deified sportsman will cross off the list all the members of his entourage who come with the 'uncomfortable truths', but I also believe that when an entourage unites, becomes solid and knows how to say 'NO' to the star, sooner or later the sportsman, like a prodigal son, will fall off the cliff and will know who are the ones who really care about his good and who are the ones who take advantage of his assets.

Rest in peace Diego.

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