The Soccer Ball Used for Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ World Cup Goal Sells for $3.35 Million at Auction

The soccer ball used for two of Diego Maradona’s most iconic goals has sold at auction for $3.35 million, well below its $10 million pre-sale estimate. Maradona used the ball to score both of Argentina’s goals in their 2-1 victory over England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final in Mexico City: the infamous “Hand of God” opener and another, scored just four minutes later. The high-stakes match came four years after the two countries clashed in the Falklands War.

The sale was part of Heritage Auctions’ Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction, where the ball was offered alongside items associated with some of the biggest names in sports history, including a rare Honus Wagner baseball card, game-worn jerseys from Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle, and memorabilia from Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. This is on that list,” Mike Provenzale, the production manager at Heritage Auctions, told the Athletic’s Larry Holder and Asli Pelit prior to the auction. It began when Maradona played the ball forward to teammate Jorge Valdano.

Steve Hodge, a midfielder on England’s team, got a touch on it, sending it looping toward the penalty area, where Maradona and goalkeeper Peter Shilton raced to meet it. The two players leapt, and more than 100,000 fans in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca held their breath. What happened next would be celebrated in Argentina and met with outrage in England.

With better positioning than Shilton, Maradona appeared at first to reach the ball with his head and send it into the open goal, giving Argentina a crucial 1-0 lead in the elimination game. But English players immediately began protesting to the referee, holding their arms up high. While subsequent replays showed that Maradona used his left hand—not his head—to score, neither the referee nor his assistant saw the handball, and the goal stood. (Instant replay, a technology that had just begun reaching American football that same year, wouldn't be introduced to the World Cup until the 2010s.) After Argentina secured a 2-1 victory, punching their ticket to the tournament championship, Maradona famously quipped that he had scored the opening goal “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” Four minutes after the “Hand of God” goal, Maradona scored his second goal of the match, which was later voted the FIFA World Cup Goal of the Century.

Years later, in his autobiography, Maradona rejected the “Hand of God” label, writing that it was “the hand of Diego” and comparing the moment to picking the Englishman’s pocket, according to Sports Illustrated’s Grey Whitebloom. He kept it for 36 years, before selling it at auction in 2022 for $2.37 million. The ball’s $3.35 million sale this week is roughly one-third of the $9.3 million that an anonymous buyer paid in 2022 for the jersey Maradona wore in that game.

The jersey set an auction record at the time for sports memorabilia, a mark that was surpassed later that year, BBC reported. Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.