Maradona’s Missing Ball. Diego Maradona’s Golden Ball award from the 1986 World Cup is headed to auction in France next month, but like almost everything associated with the Argentine great, it will do so surrounded in controversy.
The trophy, given to the tournament’s best player, had been missing for decades prior to its public reappearance this month. In the interceding years, wild theories have developed about its whereabouts and why it wasn’t in the possession of Maradona, who died in 2020 at the age of 60.
“Maybe it was a robbery, maybe it wasn’t,” says Francois Hardy, a sports expert at Aguttes, the auction house handling the sale. “We can’t prove it. But we all know the life of Diego Maradona, and it was a very particular one. Maybe he lost it in a poker game, maybe it was the mafia, maybe it’s just something he forgot in Paris — but this is the 1980s and Maradona. You can’t rule anything out at all.”
The story of the trophy’s reappearance is almost more bizarre than the mythology surrounding its disappearance.
The trophy will likely fetch millions when it’s auctioned off on June 6. If Maradona’s heirs have anything to say about it, though, the sale won’t happen at all. They’ve teamed with a French law firm to file an injunction to prevent the sale from moving forward.
Maradona’s Missing Ball.
