It is, they always say, a short playing career, and you need to make your money while you can – an observation about professional football that was perhaps more relevant in the days when retired strikers might be found running a struggling pub or cabbing in the early hours than now, when the likes of Ronaldo, Messi and Neymar bestride the grassy sward.
The midfielder Steve Hodge belongs more to the former era than that of the Midas-age players whose revenue from image rights and endorsements alone would keep them in gold taps and gigantic watches for the rest of their lives – indeed, even Hodge’s most lucrative transfer, from Nottingham Forest to Leeds United in 1991, didn’t break the million-pound barrier.
But Hodge made one exceptionally brilliant business decision, on a day that he might not otherwise have deemed his finest. In 1986, in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City and the quarter-final of the World Cup, he swapped shirts with Diego Maradona. Those of us inexorably heading towards our free bus passes will remember the agony of that day, England’s 2-1 defeat not merely painful but cosmically unjust, the first of Maradona’s two goals scored courtesy, as the Argentinian so tauntingly, so hubristically put it, with help from the hand of God. Did the fact that Hodge’s misfired flick set up that infamous goal spur him on? Did he think: sod it, I might as well get something out of this crappy day?
Well, now he has: possibly, indeed, £4m, if estimates of what the shirt will fetch when it is auctioned by Sotheby’s in May are to be believed. A nice nest egg for Hodge, who clearly realised he had something special when he entitled his 2010 memoir The Man with Maradona’s Shirt.
Although it was not ever thus: in 2002, my husband was working on Johnny Vaughan’s World Cup Extra television programme, and the team invited Hodge to appear on the show to display the keepsake. The player, a few years into retirement, arrived carrying a flimsy Tesco carrier bag from which he produced the hallowed relic. My husband remembers three things: that the supermarket livery set off the blue of the Argentinian strip beautifully; that he immediately dispatched a junior member of the team to buy a presentation case for the purposes of televisual aesthetics; and that he advised Hodge to get the item insured, sharpish. Not that I’m saying we’re due a cut, mind.
Naturally, when global fame and the prospect of vast amounts of money collide, the row rises. Maradona’s daughter has claimed it’s not the right shirt – that Hodge in fact has the top her dad wore in the first half, in which no goals were scored, with or without divine intervention. Sotheby’s counters that it has carried out rigorous and scientific checks in order to authenticate it (what might they be? Sweat analysis? Mud samples? Febreze?). As to the whereabouts of the real thing, her lips are sealed, she says, in order to protect the owner of the One True Shirt. It is as though Dan Brown were rewriting Roy of the Rovers.
Jingoistic it might be, but I feel cheerfully well disposed towards Hodge’s midlife payday, not least because he’d had a ferociously good tournament until then and, let’s face it, nobody talks about his cross to Lineker against Poland. And he spent quite a bit of his playing career putting up with Brian Clough. And, obviously, because it was a bloody handball.
The question of whether actually owning such a garment, or even being in close proximity to it, confers greatness, is a little more dubious. The absence of the wearer – now, alas, a permanent absence, since Maradona left us for the divot-free penalty area in the sky – is a stumbling block, for sure, as the Duchess of Cornwall pointed out last week when she was shown the very shirt that Colin Firth wore in the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Again, it wasn’t so much the piece of clothing as the fact that Firth was pictured dripping wet and brooding inside it that turned a nation on to the joys of Jane Austen. “But he’s not in it, that’s a bit sad,” said Camilla, and who could disagree?
