The day Diego Maradona provided an unknown fact about the special shirts they wore against England at the 1986 World Cup

The controversy is latent and the debate around the millionaire shirt has exploded during the last few days. Former English footballer Steve Hodge decided to sell the shirt he exchanged with Diego Armando Maradona at the 1986 World Cup and the auction house in charge of the transaction expects to achieve a figure of more than $5 million, which would be a real record for such a relic. However, the Diez family claims that this outfit is not the one that the legendary player wore in the second half and warns that Hodge is lying.

While the media dispute arouses heat on one side and the other, with different arguments from the parties involved in the event, a publication by Diego Maradona on his social networks during 2016 brings to the table an unknown fact that triggers multiple questions.

In that post, Pelusa reviewed how the shirts were urgently made to face England in the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup but put an unknown fact on the table: they tried different ways of putting the shield and numbers, dismissing in the first instance a model that did not convince them. Finally, the t-shirts that were worn were with the “old” AFA badge that did not have the typical laurels and the numbers placed were those provided by authorities of the Club America of Mexico, shiny and similar to those of American football.

“Some tests were done. The first version had an Argentine rubber shield. Yes, it was rubber, attached to the shirt and with white numbers on the back. But we finally decided on a shield cooked just like that, with four stitches. And with silver football numbers on the back. It was crazy, but it was what there was...”, Diez signed back then, even sharing a photo of the front of that shirt with the “rubber shield” where you can see the clear difference between the one they finally wore against England.

The current controversy is focused on the fact that Maradona's family, in the voice of his daughter Dalma and his ex-wife Claudia Villafañe, claims that the second-half shirt is not in the hands of Steve Hodge and is not the one that will be auctioned by the Sotheby's house, a company associated with this issue that was founded in the mid-1700s.

“You have no way of verifying that it is the second half. He's lying! I'm going to explain. He (for Hodge) does not have the shirt of the two goals but he can't say it because the other one is much more valuable than the one he doesn't have. There is one for the first half and another for the second. No one can prove that the change existed. Anyone who knows just a minute, a second to my dad, you know that shirt didn't give it to anyone,” said Dalma Maradona in the program Un día perfect of Radio Metro where his mother also spoke to support his sayings.

Hodge always assured that the one he had in his possession was that of the second half, when Maradona scored the two most remembered goals in the world championships called The Goal of the Century and The Hand of God. He even wrote an autobiography called “The Man With Maradona's Shirt”. While for now the former Aston Villa, Tottenham and Leeds are keeping silent, the company in charge of the sale made a release to justify that the one that was will be auctioned between April 20 and May 4 is the one with which he scored both goals.

“Sure enough, Maradona wore a different shirt in the first half, but there are clear differences between that and what he wore during the goals. Before we put this shirt up for sale, we did a lot of diligence and scientific research on the item to make sure it was the shirt that Maradona wore in the second half for both goals. It has been in the National Football Museum for 20 years, where countless people have seen it. There has never been a claim that it is not the shirt,” a company spokesman told the English daily DailyMail.

Beyond relying on Maradona's statements in the book Thus We Won the Cup, they assured that they used a method called” Resolution Photomatching” that helped them to compare the one in their possession with the two used by the Argentine captain between the first and second half of that game: there they found coincidences in the “front patch”, the “alignment of the blue stripes with the custom shield”, “the special numbers on the back” and the” details on the sleeves” between that of the accessory and the one to be auctioned.

In the midst of all this climate of debate, Dalma opened a new theory in the last few hours after many fans claimed that the family had the first half based on a photo that went viral of Claudia Villafañe in the grandstands of a 2009 Argentine national team match where she posed with a shirt that seemed to be the one she was wearing in the first half. “What do you know who has the shirt? What do you know if the shirt we talk about is the one in my mom's picture? I am very angry because nothing is even consulted, it is stated directly! And then we see”, he signed on his networks.

Were there more than two shirts made per player in that 1986 game? Does the family's private museum have more than one version of the shirt that Maradona wore in 1986?

The truth is that this 2016 publication of Maradona comes to confirm at least the hypothesis that there were more than two shirts per player even though it was initially said that there were only two. Rubén Moschella, the AFA employee in charge of buying the coats at the last minute in a clothing house in Mexico, spoke on Radio La Red during the last hours and he warned that “it would be 40″ the t-shirts he bought. In total, there were 19 field players, so with two for each one the sum would rise to 38 and — at least — there would be two left. Infobae tried to contact Moschella to clarify this issue, but received no response.

The official story always told the story that the women of Club America embroidered the shields at the last minute on the two shirts that were made for each Argentine footballer. However, what Diego published six years ago suggests that there was at least one different test shirt. “Before arriving in Mexico, the selection had changed the design of the clothing many times. We use different models in the qualifiers, with a round neck, with a V-neck, with the widest or narrowest stripes. We even used other models for the pre-World Cup friendlies. In training, at the America club, we also wore different t-shirts every day. White, blue, red, light blue. And even stockings and shorts were always different,” he said in that post.

It is true that this detail would have been only a pearl in history. For several decades, the debate about where the shirt was for the two goals to England did not exist. Hodge always claimed that he exchanged the shirt with Diego in the second half and there was no big discussion on the subject, although decades ago in an interview with the program Versus Claudia he showed the museum and took out a shirt that he called the “of the famous goal” that he scored “to the English”.

Today the questions on this subject are symbolic, historical, but also millionaires: that of the second half, they speculate in the auction house, could be worth between 5 and 8 million dollars. And the one in the first half?

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