Although Diego Armando Maradona never officially won the Golden Ball to the best player on the planet, since at that time footballers who were not born in Europe were not considered; He did receive two special distinctions: in 1995 he received an honorary one from the magazine France Football for his career, although previously, In 1986, he had earned one for having been chosen as the best player in the World Cup in Mexico that he obtained with the Argentine team.
The relationship with both trophies was stormy. The one they gave him honorarily was shattered in July 2014, when the house where his father Don Diego lived in Villa Devoto suffered a fire. Among the material assets most affected was the prize.
The distinction for his work in the World Cup, however, was previously stolen. The native of Villa Fiorito, in his desire to recover it, moved contacts in the Neapolitan camorra to help him recover it. This is what Salvatore Lo Russo, one of the leaders, acknowledged to the Naples DDA (Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate) prosecutors Sergio Amato and Enrica Parascandolo in 2010 after his arrest.
The French newspaper L’Equipe He remembers that at 2:20 p.m. on the day of the robbery, when the bank was closing its doors, eight members of the Camorra entered the premises wearing carnival masks. The Italian newspaper journalist Il Mattino, Gigi Di Fiore, told the French newspaper that “They went through a wall with a hole” and found more than 400 chests, although they opened around sixty boxes: there they would have found two linked to the Napoli idol. They filed an immediate complaint, assuring that there were jewels, diamonds and seven watches, but also the Ballon d’Or.
“I made Maradona recover the watches through “Peppe ‘o biondo”, who found them in Picuozzi (the men of the Mariano clan) in the Spanish neighborhoods,” Lo Russo noted, according to the Italian newspaper. Corriere della Sera. But, according to that testimony, the World Cup Ballon d’Or had been melted down to sell it as pure gold: “It was not possible to recover it because it had already been melted. “I also sent a sum of 15 million lire to the place, but they returned it to me because the trophy was already gone.”. That was the most repeated version, until the last hours…
This story took an unexpected turn: they claim that the article was found by a French-Algerian named Abdelhamid B, a former gallery owner who is a fan of auctions. And, to top it off, The trophy will be auctioned on June 6, 2024 in Aguttesa house specialized in the field, located in Paris. It is estimated that its price would be between 12 and 15 million euros..
In the description on the auction site’s website, they report that the award is a golden copper alloy with black inclusions. It is 28 centimeters high, with a diameter of 15.8 cm and weighs approximately 4 kilos. They also clarify that The object has “traces of rubs and scratches” and clarifies that the identification plate is missing.. It, at the time, was presented at the renowned Lido de Paris by the firm adidas and the sports magazine France Football to Diego Maradona on Thursday, November 13, 1986. That day Diego received the Ballon d’Or and Harald Schumachergoalkeeper for finalist Germany, took the silver medal.
This recently discovered piece will be exhibited from May 21 (except weekends) and auctioned on June 6. Aguttes, who requests a deposit of 150 thousand euros to participate in the bidding, maintains that “the buyer fully knows the origin and history of this object. “No new fact after the sale may compromise the responsibility of the selling company.”
“It’s not every day we come across an object like this.”, said Maximilien Aguttes, development director of the institution. According to his story in dialogue with the French newspaper L’Equipe, Abdelhamid B found this relic on Rue d’Oran, at an event where vendors place many boxes on the ground. “You go and search, it’s like going to the fair.” He bought a box containing about 150 prizes. “Some were made of fake marble, others were made of plastic. “Then he saw one that shines,” he outlined. “I bought it all for a few hundred euros. I work by instinct, so I don’t pay attention to the rest,” he stressed. But Maradona’s Ballon d’Or would not be the only treasure that this Franco-Algerian found. There was also a Golden Loot, which is presumed to have belonged to the Dutch Marco van Basten.
“It took me a year and a half to realize that it wasn’t a handball award,” Abdelhamid admits. “I started investigating. And I realized that, in football, there had been other Ballon d’Or awards in addition to the traditional one. I thought I was getting closer to the truth. But that was the beginning of seven years of being a mythomaniac,” he added. The new owner of this shocking article explained that in his search for it he contacted, although without success, Adidas and FIFA to find out the history of this award.
It is worth noting that this is not the first item by Diego Armando Maradona to be auctioned. In May 2022, a person bought the historic shirt that Pelusa wore against England in the 1986 World Cup, in the game in which he scored the two most iconic goals of his career. The bidding, which had begun several days ago, had a final offer of 7,142,500 pounds (USD 9.2 million), according to what the Sothebys auction house informed Infobae. The figure broke any type of record in relation to a football garment.
