Maradona's 'Hand of God' shirt is up for sale.
You may bid for it from April 20th but Sotheby's reckon you'll need in excess of 4 million quid.
The shirt is presently owned by Steve Hodge who swapped with Maradona on the final whistle of the controversial game. Must be the best move he ever made.
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Comments
I remember Curbs quite rightly banning our players from requesting opposition shirts as it was demeaning. I always thought it was a misplaced mark of respect - perhaps it was more a case of the financial savvy saving for a rainy day?
Sotherby’s have got experts in to examine the shirt & photos/footage from Mexico 86 & they’re adamant that the shirt is the correct one!
It’s getting very messy & someone is going to part with £4m for the privilege
I guess the value will have increased after Maradona died, but even so he could've set himself up for a very nice life by selling it a few years ago.
Easy to compare when they wore a shirt that was seemingly only worn in that match.
The shirt was made specially for that quarterfinal, played on June 22, 1986 in the blistering Mexico City sun. The story goes that Argentina's cotton jerseys were too heavy for the heat, so manager Carlos Bilardo and Ruben Moschella, the team's technical assistant, searched for an alternative option. "We ran from one side of the city to the other with a backpack," Moschella later said in the book Maradona: The Boy. The Rebel. The God. He came back with two choices, one a darker blue and the other a lighter shade. The decision was made by Maradona who strolled in, saw the lightly striped, blue number, saying: "We'll beat England in that one."
Then it came down to local seamstresses. They had to sew on the Argentina badges and, because Moschella could only find numbers made for American football uniforms, iron on the numbers. If you look at the Maradona shirt in Sotheby's, you can see the badge looks like it's only loosely attached to the fabric -- the edges slowly peeling away because of the rushed, hand-stitched sewing. The numbers on the various shirts are also uneven and are a bizarre, sparkly silver color.
"The numbers were a joke," Maradona wrote in his book, Touched by God. "When we went out on to the field, some of the guys had sparkles on their face because the numbers were silver and sparkling. If it had happened to rain, like it had in our match against Uruguay, it was going to be a real disaster: we wouldn't know who was who or what position the others were playing."