Ball from Maradona's Hand of God and Goal of the Century sells for $3.35 million

Some balls stop being simple round objects and become part of soccer history. This is one of them: the ball Diego Armando Maradona touched twice, once with his hand and once with his feet, to change the face of a World Cup. That ball, an Adidas Azteca model, just sold at auction in the United States for $3.35 million.

The sale was handled by Heritage Auctions, the Dallas based auction house, and closed this past Saturday. The opening price had been $2.5 million, so the final figure marks a solid jump. What stands out is something else: the firm had estimated a value of up to $10 million, and the ball ended up well short of that mark.

Why all the interest in a ball from 1986? Because with that ball Maradona produced two of the most memorable plays in soccer history, in the same match, against the same opponent, just four minutes apart. It happened in the quarterfinals of the 1986 Mexico World Cup, against England. First came the Hand of God: a slap over English goalkeeper Peter Shilton that ended up as a goal despite being an obvious foul. Then, with nobody able to see it coming, Maradona took off from midfield, left five English defenders in his wake, beat Shilton again and finished it off. That second goal became known as the Goal of the Century.

A ball with a story of its own

The journey of this object has its own curious chapter too. The referee of that match, Tunisian official Ali Bin Nasser, kept the ball and held onto it for 36 years. It wasn't until 2022 that he decided to sell it, and at that point the sale brought in $2.37 million. The buyer at the time tried to resell it the following year, but that first attempt didn't pan out: no bids came in that met the minimum asking price.

This isn't the first time an object tied to that match has broken records. The jersey Maradona wore in that same game, the one he swapped with English midfielder Steve Hodge afterward, also went under the hammer in London in 2022. On that occasion, the jersey sold for $9.28 million, a figure that at the time set the record for the highest price ever paid for a piece of sports memorabilia.

Nearly four decades after that June 22, 1986 match, soccer keeps putting a price tag on the objects that witnessed one of its most controversial, and at the same time most celebrated, afternoons.