How tall was Diego Maradona?

How tall was Diego Maradona?

Diego Armando Maradona was 165 cm (5′5″) tall. That figure appears in Bloomberg's profile of the Argentine, published after his death in November 2020, and it matches the value recorded on Wikidata and used by this site. Football in the 1970s and 1980s did not measure players with the precision of modern sports science, but 1.65 m has been the consistent figure across Argentine and international sources for decades, and no reputable outlet has offered a meaningfully different number.

At 165 cm, Maradona was short for a professional footballer and short for an Argentine man of his generation. Yet he became, in the view of a great many players, coaches and fans, the finest footballer of his era, and the way he used his compact frame is central to that story.

From Villa Fiorito to the first division at 15

According to Bloomberg's profile, Maradona's talent was spotted when he was about eight, playing on the dirt pitches of Villa Fiorito, a poor suburb on the edge of Buenos Aires, by the coach Francisco Cornejo, who brought him into the youth setup at Argentinos Juniors. He made his first-division debut in 1976, ten days before his 16th birthday, and was the league's top scorer for three consecutive seasons from 1978.

He was small even then, and the stories of his youth emphasize the same qualities that would define him as a professional: close control, balance, and an almost unnatural ability to keep the ball while being kicked and pushed by bigger opponents.

A career across two continents

Maradona's club career, as summarized by Bloomberg, took him from Buenos Aires to Barcelona and Naples and back again:

Across his career he scored 346 goals in 679 games, according to the same profile. Later he coached Argentina's national team and clubs in the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and, from 2019, Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata.

The 1986 World Cup: a small man's tournament

Maradona captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, and the quarter-final against England at the Estadio Azteca on 22 June 1986 produced two of the most famous goals in the history of the sport, both of them shaped by his height.

The Hand of God: a height mismatch

In the 51st minute, according to beIN Sports, a looping ball dropped toward the England goal after England midfielder Steve Hodge miscued it into his own area, as Bloomberg's profile describes. Goalkeeper Peter Shilton, who Bloomberg lists at 1.83 m, came out to punch it. Maradona, 18 cm shorter, jumped with him and reached the ball first with his raised left hand, knocking it into the net. The referee allowed the goal.

The height gap is the heart of why the goal was so contentious. A 165 cm outfield player should not have been able to beat a 183 cm goalkeeper, who can use his hands, to a high ball. Viewers immediately suspected a handball, and replays confirmed it. The incident has been argued over ever since, and it is one of the rare moments in football where a height comparison is itself part of the story.

The Goal of the Century: a low center of gravity

Four minutes later came the counterpoint. Picking the ball up in his own half, Maradona set off on a run of more than 50 meters, beating five English defenders before scoring, as beIN Sports recounted on the goal's 40th anniversary. FIFA describes the dash as lasting 11 seconds, and it was later voted the FIFA World Cup Goal of the Century. England striker Gary Lineker later said that for the first time in his career he "felt like applauding the opposition scoring a goal."

That goal is the clearest illustration of what Maradona's build gave him. FIFA's account describes him spinning away from two opponents at the start of the run with the ball glued to his left foot. A short player with powerful thighs has a lower center of gravity, which makes it easier to change direction sharply, to ride challenges without losing balance, and to keep the ball within a tiny radius of the foot. Taller defenders, who need more time to turn their bodies, struggle against that kind of acceleration.

Argentina won the match 2-1 and went on to win the tournament. Within the space of four minutes, the same 165 cm frame had produced the most disputed goal and the most celebrated goal in World Cup history: one by beating a taller man in the air with illegal help, the other by leaving bigger men behind on the ground.

Maradona compared with football's greatest players

The table below uses the site's canonical heights for the players most often compared with Maradona, plus notable rivals and teammates.

He was shorter than every player on that list. The contrast within his own 1986 team is telling: Jorge Valdano, the tall forward who scored four goals for Argentina in Mexico, stood 23 cm above him; FIFA's account even has Valdano recalling that Maradona apologized after the Goal of the Century for not passing to him. Mario Kempes, who scored twice in the 1978 final and won that tournament's Golden Boot, was 17 cm taller. Maradona's Argentina did not need him to be big; it needed him to have the ball. The Dutch stars Gullit and Van Basten were more than 20 cm taller. Even Pelé, his joint winner of FIFA's Player of the Century award in December 2000, stood about 8 cm above him. Wikipedia notes that Maradona won the internet portion of that vote by a wide margin, with 53.6 percent against Pelé's 18.53 percent.

Maradona and Messi

The comparison fans make most often is with Lionel Messi, his compatriot and the player most frequently called his heir. Both are left-footed, both play with a low center of gravity and close control, and both carried Argentina to World Cup glory, Maradona in 1986 and Messi in 2022. Messi, at 169 cm, is about 4 cm taller. In the history of elite football, they are probably the two most celebrated examples of short players dominating a sport in which height is often an advantage.

Short for an Argentine of his generation

To see how Maradona's height compared with his countrymen, the most useful benchmark is the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's estimates of average adult height by birth cohort. For Argentine men born in 1956, the cohort closest to his 1960 birth, the average is 171.6 cm. Maradona was about 6.6 cm, or 2.6 inches, below that.

Argentine men have continued to get taller since. The NCD-RisC estimate for men born in 1996 is 174.6 cm, so the gap between Maradona and the average young Argentine man today is about 9.6 cm. The country's full trend, which rose from 162.3 cm for men born in 1896, is charted on the Argentina average height page.

Interestingly, Maradona would have been slightly above average for an Argentine man born in the 1890s. His height reflects both individual variation and the conditions of his childhood in Villa Fiorito; research on height consistently links childhood nutrition and living conditions to adult stature, though no one can say how much those factors affected any single person.

Build and weight

The site lists Maradona at 70 kg. His physique changed dramatically over a long career and an even longer public life, and any single weight figure is only an approximation for a man who played professionally from 1976 to 1997. During his peak years at Napoli and with Argentina, his build was famously compact and powerful, with strong legs and a broad chest that helped him absorb challenges.

At 165 cm and 70 kg, his body mass index would be about 25.7, slightly above the "normal" band on a BMI chart, a reminder that BMI often misclassifies muscular athletes. This page does not discuss his health later in life beyond what is necessary: Bloomberg and Channel 4 reported that he died of a heart attack on 25 November 2020, a few weeks after brain surgery.

How rare is a 165 cm footballer?

The site's database includes height records for 2,862 male footballers, from the early World Cups to the present day. Across that group the average height is 180.7 cm and the median 181 cm. Only about 1 percent of them are 165 cm or shorter. By that measure, Maradona was not just short for a footballer; he was in the shortest one percent of the notable players in the sport's history.

A handful of other players share that end of the distribution, and several have a connection to him:

What sets Maradona apart is not his height but what he achieved with it. Most players this short build careers as specialists, quick wingers or tidy passers. Maradona was the central figure of a World Cup-winning team and of a Napoli side that, as Bloomberg's profile notes, won the club's only two Italian league titles and its only continental trophy, the UEFA Cup, during his years there.

Height and positional play in his era

Being short could have been a liability against the bigger defenders he faced in Spain and Italy. Instead, he turned it into a weapon. A low, wide base made him extraordinarily difficult to knock off the ball, and his quick feet meant defenders who committed to a tackle were often beaten before they could recover. He rarely relied on heading, the one area where his height was a clear disadvantage, and built his game on dribbling, passing and set pieces.

That template, a small, low-slung playmaker who controls the game through balance and touch, has been repeated by many players since, from Romário to Messi, and it is one reason the sport continues to value technique over size in attacking midfielders.

Compare your height with Maradona

To see how you would have stood beside him, enter 165 cm and your own height into the height difference calculator. A man of average modern Argentine height (174.6 cm) would be nearly 10 cm taller. A woman of average Argentine height for the 1996 cohort (159.2 cm) would be about 6 cm shorter. You can also see what 165 cm in feet looks like, compare him with other athletes on the celebrities hub, or check where 165 cm sits for men today with the height percentile calculator.