Maradona Death Trial: An Acquittal That Arrived Without a Verdict

In the courtroom of Oral Criminal Court No. 7 in San Isidro, the name Pedro Di Spagna was read aloud, and no verdict followed. The prosecution and every plaintiff had withdrawn the accusation against him. The file records two reasons: insufficient evidence, and a finding that his conduct did not increase the risk to the patient.

That is the whole story. Six years after Diego Maradona's death, a court has declared one man blameless, and the foundation of that blamelessness is not morality but authority. The record states he was an interlocutor, that he treated Maradona only once, and that he held no power over treatment decisions.

The Maradona documents arrived as an obituary. They left as an audit of accountability.

Fifty years of writing football pitches, dugouts and transfer paperwork has left one habit intact: I read the annex before the headline. The match tells you who won; the file tells you who decided, who was paid, and who was shielded. In the Maradona case the annex is astonishingly simple, and that simplicity is the news.

Maradona died on 25 November 2026, aged 60. His daughters filed the charge: simple homicide with eventual intent. In plain terms, they argued that the care team knew the risk of death and still arranged decisions as though the consequences belonged to nobody.

Six defendants remain. At the top, neurosurgeon Leopoldo Luque and psychiatrist Agustina Cosachov. Alongside them, home-care coordinator Forlini, nursing coordinator Perroni, nurse Almirón and psychologist Díaz. Their fate is set for 22 December. The court itself cited the complexity of the process and, notably, the public impact of the trial. That second phrase matters. The judiciary is admitting there is an audience outside the room.

The first trial opened on 11 March 2026 and never finished. A judge was filming proceedings without authorisation for a documentary. Once that surfaced, the process collapsed, roughly seven months were lost, and a second trial began in April.

I do not treat that as a footnote. It is the same old disease of the football beat leaking into the courtroom: the rush to turn an event into drama, with the paperwork left behind.

In 2026 I watched the Mexico World Cup on a rented television in Dhaka, a man in his mid-twenties. What he did on the pitch needs no retelling. What stays with me is how late we understood the fragility: his body and the system around it never moved at the same pace as his talent. This trial is the final chapter of that asymmetry.

First reading: liability is decided by authority, not by contact. Di Spagna's acquittal is causal, not technical. The court drew a clean line between advisory contact and decision-making power. A man who consulted once, acted as an interlocutor, and had no say over home-care arrangements cannot carry the weight of a death. That line is the case's real precedent, and clubs, federations and insurers will quote it for years.

Second reading: the accusation has a ladder. The prosecution requested sentences according to the responsibility attributed to each accused, meaning a graded scale. The headline number is sixteen years. Note carefully: sixteen years is a request, not a ruling, and the file never specifies which defendant it targets. Headlines carry the number; the record does not. That gap manufactures most of the misunderstanding around this case.

There is a second trap, the conflation of verdict and sentence. On 22 December the court most plausibly delivers the guilt-or-innocence reading; sentencing may follow later. Miss that distinction and the same event will be reported as fresh news twice.

Third reading: a fragmented care structure is itself a risk. The home-care arrangement involved a coordinator, a nursing coordinator, a nurse, a psychologist, treating clinicians and an outside interlocutor. Responsibility was spread wide; control was concentrated nowhere. In patient-safety language this is a familiar pattern: where everyone is responsible, no one is, and after a disaster you find only gaps in the paperwork.

I have spent years reading club medical reports, fitness bulletins and return-to-play schedules. They share one refrain: week-to-week appears precisely when the injury is nowhere near healed. The same register appears here. Care on paper; a vacuum of accountability in practice.

Critics miss two things. First, the accusation against Di Spagna was withdrawn by every plaintiff, including the daughters who filed the original case. The easy reading is evidentiary weakness. The equally plausible reading is deliberate strategy: narrow the charge toward the decision-makers. Both are legally legitimate. As a reporter I am unwilling to treat either as settled truth.

Second, the real gap is not inside the criminal case. No club, no federation, no insurer holds a written standard for the medical oversight of ageing legends. Whatever the verdict, that vacuum survives. A death can be put in a dock; a system rarely is. Insurers, in my experience, quietly revisit their policies after cases like this and never announce what they learned.

And the first trial collapsed because a judge wanted to be in a documentary. The central conflict here is not only doctor versus patient; it is justice versus the market for storytelling. Anyone assuming the commercial narrative is exhausted is wrong. The cameras will gather after the verdict, and the long-running dispute over Maradona's image rights will gain another chapter.

I do not chase villains. I chase filing systems that forgot to lie. This one did not forget; it recorded, in plain language, who could decide and who could not.

Whatever arrives on 22 December, hold three numbers: six defendants, a maximum request of sixteen years, and a process that has already collapsed once. If acquittals dominate, the gap between public expectation and legal outcome becomes a credibility crisis for the judiciary. If convictions land, appeals are near certain, and the case returns for years.

The question is therefore not who is guilty. It is who owns the duty of care for the final years of the people who gave us fifty years of Saturdays. No document answers that. That absence is the strongest evidence in the file.