DIEGO MARADONA WORE MICHAEL JORDAN DREAM TEAM JERSEY TRAINING FOR 1994 WORLD CUP

## The Ultimate Sports Crossover A Champion brand USA Basketball jersey featuring Michael Jordan's 1992 USA Olympics basketball team player number, 9, and his name, "Jordan," worn by Diego Maradona while training for the 1994 World Cup that took place in the United States. The image captures more than athletic admiration. It represents the moment when basketball's greatest assembly of talent transcended sport itself. Maradona idolized one athlete more than the rest, Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan. He once wore a Team USA warmup jersey with Jordan's number, saying of the Bulls' icon: "He is my idol." This wasn't performative fandom. Maradona described Jordan as his idol, which helped explain the grainy photos of Maradona wearing an oversize version of Jordan's famed No. 9 Dream Team jersey while he was training for the 1994 World Cup. ## When GOATs Recognize GOATs In a 2019 interview with TyC Sports, Maradona said that he began admiring the San Antonio Spurs from afar even before they employed Manu Ginobili, his fellow Argentine, and kept loving the league long enough to become a Stephen Curry fan. The football legend understood greatness across sports. After Maradona's death, Magic Johnson shared two photos of himself with Maradona on social media and described meeting him as "one of the thrills of my life." Such was Maradona's appreciation for basketball that, on multiple occasions, he described Ginobili as the most accomplished athlete in their country's history. He soon learned that his new surroundings were ruled by a 5-foot-5 soccer dynamo whose stature rivaled Michael Jordan's. Or maybe even eclipsed it in that part of the world. Even to a newcomer from the United States, Diego Maradona was omnipresent throughout English's one-season stint with the now-defunct Societa Sportivà Basket Napoli franchise. Alex English, the NBA scoring champion, witnessed Maradona's global reach firsthand in Naples. ## The Dream Team's Cultural Conquest "The Dream Team is entirely responsible for the NBA's profile taking a massive jump forward. It just shaped how the world felt about the NBA." The 1992 Barcelona Olympics changed how the world consumed basketball. The Barcelona games were broadcast in 69 countries, transforming viewers around the globe into basketball fanatics. Some of those fans became professional basketballers themselves; while the NBA season before the games featured just 23 players hailing from outside the United States, the 2022 season saw 120, coming from more than twice as many countries. "It was like Elvis and the Beatles put together," Daly said. Opposing basketball players and athletes from other sports often asked to have photographs taken with the players. The Dream Team operated on a different cultural frequency. Because of security concerns due to the team's celebrity, the Dream Team did not stay in the Olympic Village. The Olympic Village had only four guards at the gate when the team arrived to pick up their credentials; one of the guards, upon seeing the Dream Team, grabbed his camera and his child while the team members were mobbed by other Olympic athletes. ## The Perfect Storm of Timing The 1994 World Cup's American setting made Maradona's jersey choice poetic. At the 1994 World Cup in the United States, Maradona played in only two games (both at the Foxboro Stadium near Boston), scoring one goal against Greece, before being sent home after failing a drug test for ephedrine doping. After scoring Argentina's third goal against Greece, Maradona had one of the most remarkable World Cup goal celebrations as he ran towards one of the sideline cameras shouting with a distorted face and bulging eyes, in sheer elation of his return to international football. For instance, the 1992 Dream Team was also the most commercialized team in the history of the Summer Olympics, according to National Sports Review. In 2017, the magazine SLAM reported that back then "Converse had signed the two biggest stars of the 1980s, but more than half of the Dream Team repped Nike in Barcelona," and this state is also significant if associated with the marketing campaign the shoe giant used for the event, adding the depiction of six players of the Dream Team as cartoon monsters for a new commercial. ## The Legacy of Cross-Sport Influence US Assistant Coach Krzyzewski referred to the Dream Team when stating, "basketball was about to explode and the dynamite stick to explode it was the Dream Team." The number of international players in the NBA soared after Barcelona, while global interest in basketball climbed to new heights. Maradona's jersey choice reflected this explosion. Speaking about the impact of the Dream Team at a promotional event, Johnson said: "It had such a big global impact on the game and it allowed kids around the world to dream that they can play in the NBA one day. The game grew in popularity and it grew in terms of our own personal brands, in terms of all the individuals." The photograph transcends sports memorabilia. It captures the moment when American basketball culture conquered the global imagination, when the Dream Team's influence reached the world's greatest footballer as he prepared for his final World Cup. Maradona understood what Jordan represented. Both men redefined what it meant to be a global sports icon in the 1990s.