The Hand of God ball sold for a third of its estimate, and the shirt got nearly three times as much
Heritage Auctions wanted close to $10m for the ball Maradona punched past Peter Shilton in 1986. It went for $3.35m, and the reasons are more interesting than the number.
Aug 25, 2026
The ball Diego Maradona punched past Peter Shilton in 1986 sold at auction over the weekend for $3.35m. Heritage Auctions had opened the bidding at $2.5m and talked before the sale about a figure closer to $10m. It got a third of that.
By any normal measure $3.35m for a football is a lot of money. By the measure that matters here, which is what the shirt from the same afternoon fetched, it is a long way short.
What the ball actually is
Argentina beat England 2-1 in the quarter-final at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City on 22 June 1986. Maradona scored both goals in the space of four minutes, and they could not have been less alike.
The first, on 51 minutes, he put in with his left hand, jumping with Shilton and getting a fist to it. The Tunisian referee Ali Bin Nasser, unsighted, gave the goal. Four minutes later came the one where he collected the ball inside his own half and went past four England players before rounding Shilton. Gary Lineker headed one back on 81. Argentina went on to win the World Cup, and Maradona later described the first goal as coming a little from his head and a little from the hand of God.
The ball itself is an Adidas Azteca, and Bin Nasser kept it for 36 years before it first went to auction in 2022.
The shirt got nearly three times as much
Maradona’s shirt from that game sold at Sotheby’s in May 2022 for $9.3m, about £7.1m. That was a record for any piece of sports memorabilia at the time, well past the $5.6m paid in 2019 for a Babe Ruth jersey. It had spent decades in the possession of Steve Hodge, the England midfielder who swapped shirts with Maradona at full time and later lent it to the National Football Museum in Manchester.
So two objects from the same 90 minutes, four years apart, and one of them is worth roughly a third of the other.
Why the gap is that wide
Some of it is obvious once you say it out loud. The shirt was on Maradona. It has his sweat in it. A ball is a ball, and the same one was being kicked by everybody else on the pitch that afternoon, including the England players he went through for the second goal. Provenance is easier to feel with a shirt.
Some of it is probably timing. May 2022 was near the top of the market for this kind of thing, with money moving into trading cards and game-worn kit at a rate that has since slowed down. An object that comes back to auction more than once also loses a little of its mystique each time, and this ball has now been offered publicly on more than one occasion.
And there is the awkward part nobody puts in the catalogue. The shirt carries the goal most people would name the best in World Cup history. The ball is best known for the one he cheated to get. Buyers can be sentimental, but they are not always comfortable.
A miss is not the same as a failure
None of which makes $3.35m a disappointment in any normal sense. It is an extraordinary sum for a football, and the number says something about how much of the game’s memory sits in those four minutes in Mexico City. Forty years on, a ball that was in the air for about a second is worth more than most players.
Maradona died in 2020. The market for anything he touched has not cooled anything like as fast as the rest of it.