Diego Maradona's Final Days: A Harrowing Testimony
Diego Maradona spent his final days bedridden, swollen, and seemingly resigned to the end, according to harrowing testimony from his personal masseur at the trial examining the circumstances of his death.
Nicolas Taffarel, who worked closely with the Argentinian icon, painted a bleak picture in court on Thursday. Maradona, he said, had simply stopped living his life.
“He wouldn’t get out of bed, he didn’t want to eat, he didn’t want to wash, he didn’t want to look after his personal hygiene,” Taffarel told the court, his voice breaking as he recalled those last days.
A Legend Fading Away
This was not the Maradona the world remembers – the man who danced through England’s defence in 1986, who bent entire World Cups to his will. This was a diminished, isolated figure, shut away in a house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, dependent on a medical team now fighting for their professional futures.
Taffarel said he had raised the alarm. He sent an audio message, played in court, urging Maradona’s doctors to be more present, to visit “every day”. He described a patient clearly in distress.
“I reported the issues I observed with him, but I saw no concrete action or swift resolution,” he said.
The masseur recalled how Maradona’s body had started to betray him.
“He was bloated, his legs were swollen,” Taffarel testified.
The medical staff, he said, tried to reassure him. They told him to calm down, that the symptoms would pass. He wanted to believe them. “When you’re anxious, you put your trust in them; you tell yourself it will pass, that everything will sort itself out. But it didn’t pass.”
It never did.
The Final Conversation
On 24 November 2020, the day before Maradona died, Taffarel made one more attempt to rouse him. He tried to coax him out of bed with mate, the traditional herbal drink that had accompanied so many of Maradona’s mornings.
The response has now become one of the most haunting details of the trial.
“He said to me: ‘I don’t want anything, Taffita, that’s it,’” Taffarel told the court. “I asked him: ‘What do you mean, that’s it?’ and he replied: ‘Nothing, that’s it.’”
Those two words – “ya está” – hang over the case. In Spanish, they can mean “it’s all right” or “it’s over”. In that room, with a fading 60-year-old who had stopped eating, stopped washing, stopped fighting, they sounded like a farewell.
The next day, Maradona died alone in his bed. The official cause: heart failure and acute pulmonary oedema, fluid filling his lungs, just two weeks after he had undergone surgery.
A Trial with Heavy Consequences
Seven healthcare professionals now sit in the dock in Argentina, accused of potential negligence that may have contributed to the death of one of football’s greatest figures. The trial, which began in mid-April, has become a public dissection not only of medical decisions, but of how a nation allowed its most famous son to reach such a state.
The defendants face up to 25 years in prison if found guilty. They deny any responsibility.
Most of them argue that their roles were limited, that their specialisms had no direct link to the clinical causes of death. They insist they did what they could within their remit, that the chain of events leading to Maradona’s heart failure lay beyond their control.
The court will decide whether that holds.
For now, the testimony continues to strip away the mythology and reveal the reality of Maradona’s final days: a fragile, swollen man, increasingly alone, surrounded by professionals who now must explain, in minute detail, what they did – and what they failed to do.
The trial is expected to run beyond this month. The questions it raises about care, responsibility, and how a country treats its greatest idol will linger far longer.
