Within a single four-minute window on a football pitch in Mexico City in June of 1986, a five-foot-five Argentine named Diego Maradona scored the most notorious goal in World Cup history and then the most beautiful — both in the same match, both against England

The single greatest player of the 1980s scored the single most controversial and the single most celebrated goals in World Cup history within four minutes of each other in the same afternoon, against the same team, at the same ground, with the same left foot and the same left hand. The specific political weight of the match, set against the recent history of Argentine-British diplomatic relations, was substantially larger than any comparable football fixture had previously carried. Four years earlier, Argentina had invaded the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas in Spanish) in April 1982; the United Kingdom, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, had responded by dispatching a Royal Navy task force to retake them; and after approximately ten weeks of combat, the war had ended in June 1982 with 255 British and 649 Argentine dead, the Argentine military junta subsequently discredited and forced from power, and diplomatic relations between the two countries suspended for the substantial majority of the subsequent decade. The 1986 World Cup match between the two national football teams — the first since the war — was, in essential respects, the substantive continuation of a political conflict that neither government had formally resolved and that both national populations continued to regard as unfinished business.

According to FIFA’s official archival coverage of the 1986 World Cup quarter-final between Argentina and England and the two goals that would come to define both Maradona’s career and the broader modern history of the sport, the first goal — scored at the 51st minute — began with a Maradona pass that was intercepted, deflected off the English midfielder Steve Hodge in a manner Hodge would subsequently describe as a “calculated back-pass” (though most contemporary observers considered it a miskick), and looped into the English penalty area toward the onrushing English goalkeeper Peter Shilton. Shilton — who at 6’1″ was approximately 20 centimetres (8 inches) taller than Maradona — jumped forward with his right hand extended to punch the ball clear. Maradona, jumping simultaneously with his left arm raised so that his left fist reached slightly higher than Shilton’s right hand, struck the ball first. The ball looped over Shilton and rolled into the empty net. The Tunisian referee, Ali Bin Nasser, and his Bulgarian linesman, Bogdan Dochev, neither of whom had a clear view of Maradona’s raised fist, allowed the goal to stand. The English players immediately protested. Terry Fenwick pursued the referee across the pitch to complain. The goal was allowed. Argentina led 1-0.

What Maradona said afterward

The specific phrase that Maradona used at the post-match press conference to describe the goal became, in essential respects, the permanent name for it. As detailed in World Football Journey’s detailed 40-year retrospective on the specific technical and cultural mechanics of Maradona’s two goals against England, Maradona told the assembled international press corps that the goal had been scored “un poco con la cabeza de Maradona y otro poco con la mano de Dios” — “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” The phrase was, simultaneously, a joke, a deflection, an implicit admission, and a piece of political theatre directed at the substantial fraction of the Argentine national audience for whom the specific mode of the goal — cheating the English — was substantially more important than the goal itself. Maradona did not formally admit the handling for another 19 years. In 2005, on the Argentine television programme La Noche del 10, he confirmed publicly what everyone had always known: “It was the hand of Diego.” He additionally noted that after the goal was awarded, he had gestured to his Argentine teammates to celebrate immediately, before the referee could reconsider the decision, telling them: “Come hug me, or the referee isn’t going to allow it.”

The four minutes between

The second goal — the goal that FIFA voters would, in a 2002 global online poll, formally designate as the greatest goal in the recorded history of the World Cup — was scored approximately four minutes and eight seconds after the first, at the 55th minute of the match. As described in Mexico News Daily’s retrospective on Maradona’s 1986 World Cup performance, Maradona received the ball from his teammate Héctor Enrique approximately 60 metres from the English goal, in his own half of the pitch, with essentially the entire English defensive structure between him and the goal. He turned 180 degrees, evaded the English midfielders Peter Beardsley and Peter Reid, sprinted toward the English penalty area, dribbled around the English defenders Terry Butcher and Terry Fenwick, dribbled around Butcher a second time as the English defender attempted to recover, rounded the goalkeeper Peter Shilton (who had, four minutes earlier, been the same goalkeeper Maradona had punched the ball past with his hand), and rolled the ball into the empty net with his left foot. The entire sequence lasted approximately ten seconds. He beat six English players, including the goalkeeper. The Uruguayan sports commentator Víctor Hugo Morales, calling the match in Spanish for Argentine radio, produced what has subsequently become one of the more quoted pieces of live sports commentary in the recorded history of the medium — “Genio! Genio! Genio!… Cosmic Kite, from which planet did you come from?… I want to cry, oh holy God, long live football!”

The match ended with Argentina winning 2-1 after Gary Lineker scored a headed goal for England in the 81st minute. Per Cesar Torres’s Conversation-syndicated academic analysis of the 40-year cultural legacy of the Argentina-England 1986 quarter-final, Argentina subsequently defeated Belgium 2-0 in the semi-final (with two more goals by Maradona) and West Germany 3-2 in the final (Maradona provided the assist for the winning goal), winning Argentina’s second World Cup and cementing Maradona’s status as the substantially most influential single individual performance in the recorded history of the tournament. Maradona finished the 1986 competition with five goals, five assists, and direct contributions to 10 of Argentina’s 14 tournament goals. He won the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player. His subsequent career included the 1987 and 1990 Serie A championships with Napoli — the club’s first two Scudetti in its century-long history and its only ones until 2023, when Napoli won a third Serie A title more than three decades after Maradona’s departure — a 15-month cocaine ban in 1991, a failed drug test at the 1994 World Cup that ended his international career in disgrace, and a series of coaching appointments across the subsequent two decades that produced substantially mixed results. He died of a heart attack on 25 November 2020 in Buenos Aires at the age of 60. Approximately 500,000 people attended his funeral procession through central Buenos Aires. The single most controversial and the single most celebrated goals in the recorded history of the World Cup remained, at his death and at the current moment 40 years after they were scored, the two moments — separated by four minutes on a Mexican Sunday afternoon in June 1986 — that most substantially defined the man who had produced them.