The auction began for the shirt that Maradona wore against England in 1986: the millionaire bid that was made

After all the controversy that arose over the authenticity of the garment, the British auction site Sothebys launched the tender for the shirt with which Diego Armando Maradona converted both goals to England in the quarterfinals of the World Cup in Mexico 86. The jacket that was in the hands of former English footballer Steve Hodge, who exchanged it with the Diez, was presented in a gallery in London and a millionaire offer for it has already appeared.

Within hours of the release of the lot, a interested party bid 4 million pounds sterling (5.22 million dollars) to keep the iconic number 10 Le Coq Sportif nylon brand. It will be published for 14 more days: that is, on Tuesday, May 3, it will be won by the highest bidder.

“The shirt is in good general condition consistent with heavy wear, perspiration and athletic activity. Slight fraying at the hem at the bottom front of the shirt and minor stains everywhere”, is the description of the auction site.

The auction catalogue note:

Few moments in sports can really change the line between athletics and something bigger. For Americans, people's minds could go to the famous Miracle on the Ice, when the United States defeated the Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics during the height of the Cold War. However, these moments are few and far between in the sports world, when a game can go beyond the limits of physical competition. For England and Argentina, after a bitter conflict in the Falkland Islands War just a few years earlier, that moment was covered during the 1986 World Cup quarterfinals, when the two met in a high-stakes match steeped in historical significance.

On June 22, 1986, 25-year-old Diego Maradona “El Niño de Oro” —whom many consider to be the greatest in football history—would make history in the match and cement his name permanently in the chronicle of the sport and on the biggest stage in the world on that. Two of the most extraordinary (and perhaps one of the luckiest) goals in the sport of football were scored in the same match, and no less, by the same player.

The first, known worldwide as “The Hand of God”, occurred when Maradona - in the second half of the Quarterfinals - scored a goal with his hand. Everything happened quickly, and in the blink of an eye, Maradona had deceived the officials, masking their mischief with a convincing celebration. As the referees did not have a clear vision of the play, the goal remained, giving Argentina a 1-0 lead in the match. In his own words, Maradona would say that he told his teammates: “I told them: 'Come and hold me, or the referee will not allow it. '” After the match, Maradona was quoted as saying that he scored the goal with “a little with Maradona's head, and little with the hand of God”. He would later explicitly state that he felt it was a “symbolic revenge” for the victory of the United Kingdom in the Falkland Islands War.

The second goal known as the “Goal of the Century”, which many consider to be the best individual goal of all time, occurred when Maradona dribbled a crowd of England players, dancing around them in an angelic style, carrying the ball half the length of the field and scoring a tremendous second goal for English goalkeeper Peter Shilton.

In 2002, FIFA held a vote as part of a promotion for the 2002 World Cup. Over a span of 6 weeks, more than 340,000 votes were cast from more than 150 countries, and Maradona's second goal in the match received the title of “Goal of the Century”. The goal would cement Argentina's 2-1 win in the contest against the English. Argentina would win the 1986 FIFA World Cup.

After the match, England midfielder Steve Hodge (the consignee of this offering), who had accidentally thrown the ball to Maradona in the game “The Hand of God”, decided that he would ask Maradona to exchange shirts. In an interview with FIFA, Hodge recalled: “I thought, I won't be here again. I'll try to get a shirt... I shook hands with Maradona. He was being harassed by his peers. So I thought, 'It doesn't make sense, just leave it. '” Hodge then did a television interview and then had a second chance encounter with Maradona. “After the interview, I went down, behind the goal, to the locker room... As I went down, Maradona walked with two of her teammates. I looked him in the eye, pulled my shirt as if he said 'is there any possibility of exchange? ' , and he came up, made a gesture of prayer and we exchanged t-shirts. And that was it. It was as simple as that. Touched by God, “On the way to the locker room, one of the English boys, turned out to be Hodge, but I wasn't sure at the time, he asked me to exchange t-shirts with him. I said yes and we did it.” The shirt has been loaned to the National Football Museum in Manchester since 2002.

Part of Sotheby's challenge in evaluating the shirt was to identify the shirt with the two historic goals. As part of this effort, Sotheby's worked with Resolution Photomatching to match the shirt to both objectives, examining unique details in various items of the article, including the patch, stripes, and numbering. Resolution Photomatching was able to make a conclusive photomatch to the celebration after the goal of “The Hand of God”. The Photomatching resolution determined that Maradona changed shirts during the match, but that Maradona wore this shirt for the two historic goals in the second half of the match.

The shirt itself also has an interesting story. After beating Uruguay in the round of 16, coach Carlos Bilardo was worried that the cotton shirts would be too heavy in the scorching heat of Mexico City. Therefore, coach Bilardo sent a member of his coaching staff, Rubén Moschella, to look for a last-minute option that would better adapt to the hot conditions. Apparently, they couldn't choose between two options. Maradona would appear later and look at this same style of t-shirt and say: “That one. We'll beat England on that.” Moschella bought enough to equip the team, and two seamstresses on the training ground sewed improvised patches from the Argentine Football Association. Then, the numbers were ironed on the back of the t-shirts. Maradona would joke in his book Toca dos por dios that, “The numbers were a joke. When we went out on the field, some of the boys had flashes on their faces because the numbers were silver and shiny... And after kit genius Tito Benros ironed those numbers on thirty-eight shirts, it looked like he should have been to a carnival, not the Azteca Stadium! If it came to rain, as happened in our match against Uruguay, it was going to be a real disaster: we would not know who was who or in what position the others were playing.”

A key part of understanding the article is to understand the historical context of the Argentina-England rivalry. The Falkland Islands War began on April 2, 1982, approximately 4 years before the historic World Cup match, when Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands, which the Argentines claimed as their own territory. As the islands had been under British leadership since the 1840s, the British, of course, disagreed. On April 5, the British government sent the Navy to confront the Argentine armed forces. The conflict lasted more than 2 months and would culminate in the British victory. The war came at a serious cost, with more than 600 Argentine military personnel losing their lives as well as more than 250 British troops. The history and rivalry between the two countries imbued this football match with a profound historical, personal, and patriotic context for both nations. In his autobiography Maradona would say:

“It was like beating a country, not a football team. Although we said before the game that football had nothing to do with the Malvinas War, we knew that many Argentine boys had died there, who had cut us like birds... That was our revenge, it was... to recover... part of the Falklands. We all said beforehand that we shouldn't mix the two things but it was a lie. A lie! We didn't think of anything other than that, like hell it was going to be just another game!”

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