Seven Hands for One Body: Maradona's Second Trial and the Responsibility That Was Divided

TWO DATES, THE 22ND, AND THE SILENCE IN SAN ISIDRO

On 22 October, at the criminal courthouse in San Isidro, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Pedro Di Spagna walked out of the courtroom a free man. He was the clinical doctor, one of seven people tried for the death of Diego Armando Maradona. The prosecution withdrew its accusation. Then all the plaintiffs withdrew theirs, including Maradona's two daughters. With no one left to accuse, the panel acquitted him. A man in a white coat walked out the door, and behind him six others stayed in their seats.

Those six now wait for 22 December. Two months. The presiding judge explained the length of the deliberation with a phrase I read over and over: the case carried "public repercussion." Those two words hold almost the whole tragedy of this story. A man died in a rented house in Tigre, and that death weighs so much that people need two extra months just to finish writing the argument.

In the corridor, Argentine reporters recorded defence lawyers shaking hands. No cheering. No raised fists. A legal battle won because the other side walked away has no moment of victory — only the lightening of one man and the added weight on the rest.

I sat in Binh Duong, eleven time zones from San Isidro, reading the report close to midnight. It was raining outside. And an image surfaced in my mind with nothing to do with the law: Maradona's hands against England in 2026, the left hand rising like an unconscious reflex, the hand of a poor kid stealing a ball at the Azteca. Thirty-four years later, those same hands — swollen now, trembling now, holding nothing now — became the subject of a criminal trial.

People score goals with their feet, but I write with my scars. And the deepest scar in Argentine football is not any defeat; it is the gap between one bedroom and the seven people paid to watch over it.

SIX WHO STAYED SEATED

The charge uses a phrase that sounds like a riddle when translated: homicidio simple con dolo eventual — simple homicide with eventual intent. Put plainly: prosecutors argue these people did not kill anyone actively, but they saw death as a possibility and let it happen.

The six names remaining in the dock were Leopoldo Luque, the neurosurgeon once seen by all of Argentina as Maradona's saviour; Agustina Cosachov, the psychiatrist; Nancy Forlini, who coordinated home care; Mariano Perroni, the nursing coordinator; Ricardo Almirón, a nurse; and Carlos Díaz, a psychologist. Seven people, seven specialisms, one patient.

From my experience of watching matches, I learned one thing about reading a collective: to understand how a team works, watch the moment it concedes. Who runs back, who stands still, who turns to shout at the man beside him. Here, the net that broke was a man weighing over a hundred kilos, lying on a bed that met no medical standard, in a house that the record says had no resuscitation equipment. And when the net broke, all seven could point at the man next to them.

Diego Maradona died on 25 November 2026, four weeks after his sixtieth birthday, following brain surgery and a recovery organised at a private home. His two daughters filed a complaint, and that complaint began a journey of nearly five years before the first trial ran its course.

The first trial collapsed in a way that is almost impossible to believe. A judge filmed a documentary during proceedings without authorisation, and the case was suspended. The panel had to be reconstituted, everything restarted, every page reread. For a family waiting for justice, every passing month is a funeral replayed. For a judiciary, it is a scratch on credibility.

The figure of sixteen years, which I read in the coverage, needs to be placed correctly. Argentine press reported that prosecutors requested sentences of up to sixteen years for some defendants, but the report did not specify which of those involved it was directed against. That is a request by the accusing side, not a ruling by the court. It is the voice of one party in a debate, not the bell that ends it.

And 22 December is the day the court speaks in its own voice.

A BODY DIVIDED

What held me longest in the whole record was not the charge but the staffing structure of the care. A neurosurgeon monitoring the surgical wound. A psychiatrist monitoring sedatives and mental state. A psychologist monitoring emotional life. A home-care coordinator. A nursing coordinator. A nurse on the ground. And a clinical doctor who, it was later established, visited the patient once and was described as an "interlocutor" with no authority over the treatment plan.

Seven roles, and no commander. In football we call that a back line without a leader: every defender does his own job properly, and the ball still goes between two of them.

This is the legal crux, and the human crux at once. When responsibility is split across overlapping specialisms, proving a single causal chain becomes nearly impossible, and that is precisely the terrain on which an "eventual intent" charge slips most easily. To convict someone of having foreseen death and accepted it, prosecutors must show that the person was aware of the risk within the scope of his own authority. But authority here was diced so finely that every piece could say: that was not my part.

Di Spagna is the cleanest example of that defence. He did not deny the death. He showed that he held no power over the decision to keep Maradona at home rather than move him to a hospital, no power over the treatment plan, no command of the nursing team. The prosecution agreed. The plaintiffs agreed. And the court acquitted him, with a conclusion I consider the most important in the entire case: he did not increase the risk to the patient.

Once a court accepts that evidentiary standard for the first man, it becomes the yardstick for the other six. Their defences will be variations on one sentence: my part began and ended here, and the danger lay beyond my reach.

One technical detail deserves a pause. The presence of a home-care coordinator and a nursing coordinator suggests the accusation most likely targets failures of supervision and coordination rather than a specific medical act. In other words, the court must answer a question football knows well: when a whole system collapses, who is responsible — the one who decides, the one who executes, or the one who should have objected?

I have seen another version of that question. In 2026, in Kazan, I sat in the stands and watched Germany — the reigning champions — fall to South Korea. An entire system in crisis of belief, and when the whistle went, nobody on the bench stood up to take the blame. The German machine broke, and I saw a generation weep without a sound. In San Isidro the same structure repeats in different material: a care system with no one at the helm, and a death with no one to claim it.

What I mean is not a verdict on guilt. What I mean is that the structure existed before the death, built by very ordinary decisions: rent a house instead of admitting him, hire a dispersed team instead of placing him in an institution, divide by specialism instead of by responsibility. Each decision, alone, made sense. Together they made a hole.

WHAT INTENT MEANS

There is a distinction that journalism often compresses for brevity, and the compression distorts how the public understands the whole case. Negligence and eventual intent are charges very far apart. A negligent doctor is judged by an objective standard: what a professional of equivalent training, in the same circumstances, should have done. A doctor charged with eventual intent is judged by a subjective standard: did he picture death, and accept it.

The second is far harder, because it requires reading the inside of a person's head. No camera records the moment someone thinks: let it be, worst case he dies.

So the trial really turns on a much narrower question than the public imagines. Not "was the care bad" — most parties agree it was. But "did any of these people see death coming and let it arrive".

That is why the ruling on 22 December may satisfy no one. It may be a mixed verdict: some convicted on a lesser basis, some acquitted, some given sentences in between. In a structure of divided responsibility, a mixed outcome is the most logical one, even if it is the least awaited.

I reread the presiding judge's phrase about "public repercussion" and find something painful in it. A judge admitting he needs more time because the case resonates means he knows this ruling will be read in two languages: the language of law and the language of public opinion. And those two rarely mean the same thing.

Football has its own version of this problem: a referee checks VAR three times before awarding a penalty in the 88th minute. Everyone knows the right decision will enrage half the stadium. That does not make the decision wrong, but it makes it heavier. In San Isidro there is no screen, only two months of deliberation and a ruling that must stand up both to an appeal court and to collective memory.

A BODY AS PUBLIC PROPERTY

There is a deeper layer the legal reporting never touches, and I think it is the real reason this case carries global weight.

Maradona's body was never his own property. It became public property in 2026. People watched that ankle swell, watched that belly grow, watched that hand tremble at an awards ceremony. A whole nation followed the decomposition of a genius the way one follows a long-running series, and every stage of it was sold as tickets, as bulletins, as content.

When a body is public property, caring for it also becomes a public act. And when it dies, the responsibility for caring for it becomes a public question.

At this layer, the Maradona case is a precedent for sports medicine ethics. I doubt the lawyers in San Isidro are thinking about that. But a ruling here will send a signal about how famous athletes are cared for: through scattered individual medical contracts, or through a structure with someone ultimately accountable.

For decades, the care model for stars has been dispersed: one contract per specialist, one slice each, and nobody signing for the whole. That model is cost-efficient and schedule-flexible. It fails at exactly one point: when something goes wrong, no one is responsible.

The stadium is empty, but the applause still lingers somewhere in memory. Here, the house in Tigre is quiet now, but the question of who holds the key is still hanging.

There is another commercial dimension I raise only to bound the analysis: Maradona's image legacy still generates value every day, and that structure sits outside the indictment. But that is another story, and it helps none of the six waiting for a ruling.

THE BLIND SPOT OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Here I want to say plainly what I believe is the largest blind spot in how the public reads this case.

Collective memory needs a hand. When a giant dies, we cannot accept the thought that nobody killed him. We need a culprit, an act, a moment to point at and say: there. Because without that moment, death becomes a process, and a process gives us no one to be angry with.

But the responsibility structure here offers no single hand. It offers seven hands, each of which did part of its job, and a hole in the middle. That hole was never indicted. It has no name, no age, no defence lawyer.

I think about my own trade. Thirty-eight years writing about sport, and I recognise a bad habit of the profession: we always write about the man who scored, rarely about the man who did not run back. In every defeat there is a name chosen to be the tombstone. In San Isidro that tombstone does not exist, and its absence unsettles the public more than a heavy sentence would.

The second blind spot is the number sixteen. A large number has its own gravity, and it is usually read as a forecast. It is not a forecast. It is one side's demand, relayed by the press, tied to no named defendant, and carrying no guarantee that the court will accept it. When a report offers a dramatic figure without attaching it to a person, we should read it one beat slower.

The third blind spot is subtler. The first trial collapsed because a judge filmed a documentary. That detail says this case has already been turned into film once, and being turned into film is one way for truth to be bent into a narrative shape. When a case becomes content, it starts operating by the laws of content: it needs a climax, a villain, a clean ending. The second trial is trying not to become film. Two months of deliberation may signal a divided panel, or a panel determined to write carefully. I lean toward the second, but only lean.

And here is the most counter-intuitive point: the most important event of this trial may already have happened, on 22 October, when a doctor was acquitted because both sides conceded there was insufficient evidence. That moment set the standard for everything after it. It says this court will not convict merely because the public wants someone convicted. For a judiciary, that is good news. For a family five years into waiting, it is hard to hear.

WHAT REMAINS AFTER 22 DECEMBER

On 22 December, six people will learn their legal fate. But the story will not end there, and anyone expecting a full stop that day should prepare for a comma. An initial ruling will almost certainly be appealed. The file will travel upward, and the case will live on in higher courts longer than the time people have already waited.

At fifty-four, I understand that stadium lights illuminate a whole life. They shine when you are fifteen and nobody knows your name. They shine when you are twenty-five and the world knows it. And they still shine when you are sixty, lying in a room in Tigre, while people argue about whose fault it was.

The ball rolls on the grass, but in truth it rolls across human fates.

What I want to take from this story is not a judgement on those six people. I have no file, I did not sit in the courtroom, I did not hear the witnesses. What I want to take is a question for the industry that produced Maradona and let him die in a rented house: how long will we keep treating the care of a genius as a series of separate contracts, rather than as a responsibility with one person at the helm?

On 22 December, the court will answer the legal part. The rest — how a country learns to grieve without needing a guilty man — no court can answer. It has to be answered by a generation of sports professionals who understand that behind every name on a scoreboard is a real body, with doctors, with contracts, with someone who must sign the last sheet of paper.

And in San Isidro, six people are still seated. In those two months, each of them is probably asking an identical question: where does my part begin, and where does it end.