The white Adidas Azteca that Diego Maradona punched past Peter Shilton in Mexico City 40 years ago sold for $3.35m (£2.5m) at Heritage Auctions in Dallas on Saturday — roughly a third of the $10m-and-up estimate the auction house had attached to it, and well under half the $9.3m paid at Sotheby’s in 2022 for the shirt Maradona wore in the same match.
Bidding on the Summer Platinum Night lot opened at $2.5m and closed at $3.35m. The buyer has not been identified. Even at that figure, the most argued-over object in football history did not become the most expensive ball ever sold: that record still belongs to Shohei Ohtani’s 50th home run ball, which fetched $4.392m in 2024.
Four minutes that rewrote a rivalry
The ball was in play for both halves of the most contradictory six minutes any footballer has produced. On 22 June 1986, in front of more than 114,000 at the Estadio Azteca, Maradona rose with Shilton in the 51st minute of a World Cup quarter-final and steered the ball into the England net with his left fist. Tunisian referee Ali Bin Nasser, unsighted, gave the goal.
“I couldn’t see the incident clearly,” Bin Nasser said years later. “The two players, Shilton and Maradona, were facing me from behind.”
Four minutes later, with the same ball, Maradona collected possession inside his own half, beat five England players across 60 yards and rounded Shilton — the strike FIFA voters would later crown the Goal of the Century. Gary Lineker pulled one back in the 81st minute; Argentina won 2-1, then beat Belgium and West Germany to lift the trophy. Maradona’s line about the first goal — scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God” — gave the ball its name. He admitted much later that it should not have stood.
Bin Nasser took the match ball home to Tunisia, as officials of that era routinely did, and kept it for 36 years. Heritage said experts photo-matched the ball’s panel markings to images taken during the match before it was consigned.
Why $10m became $3.35m
The gap between estimate and hammer is the story here, and it is not the first time this particular lot has disappointed. The ball first went under the hammer at Graham Budd Auctions in London in November 2022, selling for £2m ($2.37m) against an upper estimate of £3m. Relisted the following year, it drew a top bid of $2.04m and failed to clear its reserve. Saturday’s result is an improvement in cash terms, but it is the third consecutive sale at which the ball has been valued far more highly by its sellers than by the market.
Timing did not help. Heritage brought the lot to Dallas five weeks after the 2026 World Cup final at MetLife Stadium, where Spain beat Argentina 1-0 through Ferran Torres’s 106th-minute goal. A tournament win for Argentina — and the wave of Maradona nostalgia that would have followed a second star in four years — was the scenario the estimate implicitly priced in. Instead, the sale landed in the flat weeks after a defeat.
The deeper problem is that balls do not command what shirts do. Collectors pay for objects that carry a player’s body: sweat, number, name. Babe Ruth’s 1932 World Series jersey went for $24.12m in 2024. Maradona’s 1986 shirt made $9.3m. A ball, however precisely authenticated, is a mass-produced sphere whose value rests entirely on documentation — and this one is documented as the instrument of a foul.
What happens to it now
The buyer’s silence leaves the ball’s future open. Bin Nasser said before the first auction that he hoped whoever bought it would put it on public display, and there is a precedent: the shirt from the same match, bought by Qatar’s Sports Museum, hangs in the 3-2-1 collection in Doha, where it drew crowds throughout the 2022 tournament.
A ball with two stories attached is a curator’s gift. It is simultaneously the evidence of the most notorious act of cheating in the sport and the object at the end of the best goal ever scored, and the argument between those two readings has never been settled — not by Maradona, who died in November 2020 aged 60, and not by the England players who still describe the afternoon as theft.
For the memorabilia trade, Saturday’s number is a data point worth logging. The market for football’s founding relics has grown enormously since 2022, but it has also learned to discount hype. A ball can be historic, verified and unique, and still sell for a third of what its seller expects.
Sources: Yahoo Sports, TRT World, Heritage Auctions via Yahoo, CNN, CBS News
**Note on the brief:** the £2.5m headline figure is correct, but it refers to Saturday’s Heritage Auctions sale in Dallas ($3.35m), not the 2022 London auction — the ball has now been through three sales. Word count: ~740. The final sources paragraph is outside the requested tag set; drop it if your CMS handles attribution separately.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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