After Diego

They built a church out of a football player, and they date everything from him. The Iglesia Maradoniana describes itself as a parody religion centred on Diego Maradona, and it was founded in Rosario, Argentina, on 30 October 1998 - his thirty-eighth birthday - by Héctor Campomar, Alejandro Verón and Hernán Amez. Its years are counted from his name: d. D., después de Diego, 'after Diego'; its god is written D10S, a joke across Dios and the ten on his shirt; and the phrase the sources record for what he is, in Argentina, is 'God of football'. One founder said the whole subject out loud. Verón's explanation: 'I have a rational religion and that's the Catholic Church and I have a religion passed on my heart and passion and that's Diego Maradona.' Nothing in the relation is reciprocal and nothing about it is a mistake - a real man was promoted into a position where the vocabulary of address already existed, and the vocabulary fit. The church kept the form of the thing it parodies: it baptises, and the record describes the rite as heading a football in front of an altered photograph associated with the 1986 Hand of God goal. The member count is self-reported, and the entry keeps it that way. The church claims more than 40,000 members worldwide, with over 9,000 in Spain; those are its own figures, reported as such. What needs no counting is the shape: a fan bond that built itself a liturgy, on a schedule, with witnesses, while its figure was still alive. The athlete shelf watches for whether an attachment survives the person leaving, and Rosario answered the question in writing, on a birthday, years early.