Diego Maradona used this exact ball to punch it past England’s goalkeeper in 1986. Decades later, it just went under the hammer in the US. The auction house called it the most important piece of soccer history in existence, but the final price tag tells a different story.
You watch a player punch a ball into the net, and it becomes the most famous cheat in sports history. You keep that ball in your closet for thirty years. Then you sell it, and it ends up being worth millions. But even millions isn’t always what the experts think it should be.
That is exactly what happened this weekend. The actual Adidas Azteca football that Diego Maradona used to score his infamous “Hand of God” goal against England in the 1986 World Cup just sold at Heritage Auctions in the United States.
The final price was $3.3 million, which is about £2.5 million.
That is a massive pile of cash. But it actually fell pretty flat. The auction house thought this piece of history would easily pull in closer to $10 million.
Mike Provenzale, a specialist auctioneer at Heritage, did not hold back when talking about the ball’s importance before the sale.
“It’s a true one-of-one item,” Provenzale told reporters. “Arguably the most significant soccer item that exists.”
The ball has had a wild journey. When the referee, a Tunisian man named Ali Bin Nasser, blew the final whistle on that quarter-final match in Mexico, he just picked up the ball and took it home. He kept it quietly for over three decades.
In 2022, Bin Nasser finally sold it for $2.37 million. The person who bought it tried to flip it the very next year, but nobody wanted to pay the minimum asking price, so it sat on the shelf until this weekend.
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It is funny how the sports memorabilia market works. The actual shirt Maradona was wearing when he punched that ball and when he dribbled past half the English team for his “goal of the century” just minutes later sold for a staggering £7.1 million back in 2022.
The shirt got the record-breaking price. The ball, the actual object that Maradona’s fist connected with to change World Cup history, had to settle for a little less.
The gavel came down. The money changed hands. And the ball that caused the biggest argument in football history is off to a new home.
