The governing body for soccer in Argentina is celebrating after the jersey a national hero wore in one of the country’s greatest footballing triumphs finally came home.
The Asociación del Fútbol Argentino (AFA) announced on Wednesday, October 19, that the shirt Diego Maradona wore in the 1986 FIFA World Cup final had been repatriated to Argentina. They posted a video to their Twitter account thanking former German national team player Lothar Matthäus for returning it.
The video details the friendship between Matthäus and Maradona. The pair found themselves on opposite sides of many club and national team matches over the years, including the 1986 World Cup final, in which Argentina beat West Germany, and the 1990 World Cup final, in which West Germany beat Argentina.
“As true friends do, they were together through thick and thin. One captain lived the glory in ’86, and for the other the glory came in ’90,” the video narrator says (translated to English by Google). “With time, his Argentine friend became eternal. And here comes the best, because that German captain who was left without his friend went on to have 45 million Argentine friends.
“Who would have thought that the same captain who took glory from us in ’90 would return it to us 32 years later to all Argentines.”
Matthäus officially handed over the shirt — in Argentina’s traditional home pattern of sky blue and white vertical stripes — during a ceremony at the Argentinian embassy in Madrid, Spain, in August, and is now on Argentinian soil. According to Sky News, Matthäus swapped shirts with Maradona at halftime of the 1986 final, which Argentina went on to win 3-2.
“This shirt belongs to all the Argentine people,” Matthäus is quoted as saying on the AFA website. “They have offered me a lot of money for it, but sentimental value cannot be bought with anything.”
“[The shirt is] an important armor for all of Argentine football. This shirt allowed us to hug each other when we won the title of Mexico,” added AFA president Claudio Tapia. “The value of this armor, it means a lot to our country and our history. Being here is very valuable.”
Notably, this is not the Maradona jersey that sold for £7,142,500 ($8.93 million US) earlier this year, making it the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia ever sold at the time. That jersey was a blue away kit worn in Argentina’s quarterfinal match against England in the same World Cup — the match in which Maradona scored both the “Hand of God” goal and the “Goal of the Century.”
The “Hand of God” shirt stood as the most expensive sports memorabilia ever sold for only a few months. In September 2022, Sotheby’s auctioned off a Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls jersey worn in Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Finals for $10.1 million US.
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