Today, we watch the most iconic warm-up in football history – Diego Maradona’s dance to Live is Life by the Austrian group Opus. I remember when I was 16, my father and I were up in the wee hours in Australia, about to watch the 1990 World Cup opener: Argentina versus Cameroon. I’ll never forget seeing, for the first time, the late Argentine football magician Maradona strutting his stuff in the warm up to that game.
(Just to clarify — the warm-up featured in today’s article is from another match playing vs Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup, which I’ll get to shortly.)
My father and I just sat there, staring in stunned disbelief. To this day, Maradona is the only footballer I can recall who seemed to have the ball magnetically drawn to him – like a lost limb joyfully reuniting with its owner.
Now I live in football heartland – Colombia – where the sport is the country’s great passion, endlessly swooned over and debated until the commentators turn blue in the face. You might remember the horrific incident involving Colombian defender and captain Andrés Escobar, who scored an own goal at the 1994 World Cup and was murdered in his hometown of Medellín just five days after Colombia’s elimination from the tournament. There was a brilliant documentary made ESPN about the intersection of Colombian football with criminal activity called The Two Escobars. The other Escobar, of course, refers to the drug lord Pablo Escobar, who unleashed a wave of terror on Colombia the likes of which the country could never have imagined. The documentary showed how Andrés Escobar – a young man – lost his life over an honest mistake, and how football became stained by illegal money amid the nation’s tumultuous war on drugs.
Fast-forward to today, and the next World Cup in 2026 is fast approaching. Both my homeland, Australia, and my adopted home, Colombia, have qualified. My kids hold dual citizenship – Colombo-Australians, if you like. It frightens me to think what would happen if Australia and Colombia ended up in the same group – or faced each other later in the tournament. Who would my children barrack for? Basically, it feels like a small domestic crisis waiting to happen.
Now, back to today’s featured song – Live Is Life. I first heard it while watching the video below of Maradona strutting to it, performing football drills and skills that would make any fan (including yours truly) drool in admiration. It’s an iconic video from Maradona’s playing days (in terms of his legacy) – certainly comparable with his legendary 1986 World Cup goal of the century versus England where he took the ball from his own half and dribbled past 5 England players and went on to beat goalkeeper Peter Shilton with a feint before slotting the ball into the net. On the topic of football documentaries – for you football nuts out there – there’s another fantastic one when former England player Gary Lineker visited Maradona in Argentina.
Opus, the band behind Live is Life, was formed in Graz, Austria in 1973. They began as a rock group playing local clubs before breaking through internationally in the mid-1980s. Live is Life was recorded during a live concert in 1984 and captured the spirit of that moment perfectly – the audience clapping in time, the energy of the crowd feeding the song’s infectious rhythm. The song became an unexpected global hit, topping charts across Europe and reaching the top 40 in the United States. And for me, it will always bring back the image of Diego Maradona smiling, swaying and performing magic on that pitch.
References:
1. Live Is Life – Wikipedia
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
The footage of Maradona’s soccer acrobatic is certainly impressive. I feel less enthusiastic about the Opus song. When it came out, it was on the radio in Germany all the time. While it’s undoubtedly catchy, the overexposure kind of ruined it for me.
I can see how the song may have overstayed its welcome for you due to it’s repetitive nature and being played so often. I have only ‘ever’ associated the song with this video of Maradona swaying and playing to it. So ‘Live is Life’ remains special to me perhaps more for how iconic the video of Maradona is than the music itself.