Lionel Messis shirts sell for $7.8m but Michael Jordan still holds the record

A collection of six shirts worn by Lionel Messi during the 2022 World Cup has become the most expensive sports memorabilia sold this year after being bought at auction for $7.8million (£6.1m).

The shirts, some still stained with dirt, have spent the last two weeks hanging in the lobby of Sotheby’s in New York, next to a backdrop of the Argentina flag. They were worn by him during each round of the tournament including the dramatic final against France which Messi’s Argentina side won on penalties.

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Sotheby’s briefed that the estimated price would be “in excess of $10million”, which would have made it “the most valuable collection of sports memorabilia” ever sold at auction.

But the winning bid fell some way short of this, meaning a 1998 Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls jersey still holds the world record.

How did the auction work?

Although the shirts were displayed in Manhattan, the auction was carried out online via the Sotheby’s website. Bidders had to register with Sotheby’s first, to deter timewasters.

The leading bid remained at $6.5million until the last minute of the two-week auction, which closed at midday Eastern Standard Time (5pm GMT) on Thursday, before it shot up in the final minute to $7.8m.

The winner’s identity had not been revealed at the time of writing.

Which shirts are they?

Footballers these days often change shirts at half-time, as they get sweaty. One shirt in the collection is the one Messi wore in the first half of the World Cup final — a half in which he scored as Argentina went 2-0 up at the break before France staged a comeback.

The set also includes shirts he wore in each of the three knockout rounds and two of three group games (the matches against Saudi Arabia and Mexico, but not Poland). Argentina started the tournament slowly with a shock loss to Saudi Arabia, then an hour passed without a goal against Mexico, before Messi broke the deadlock in an eventual 2-0 win.

In the knockout stages, they made hard work of a 2-1 win against Australia in the round of 16, a game in which Messi marked his 1,000th senior game with a brilliant goal. After beating the Netherlands on penalties, following a 2-2 draw in which Messi scored, Argentina finally looked like competitors in a 3-0 semi-final defeat of Croatia.

The final against France, a 3-3 draw followed by a penalty shootout won 4-2 by Argentina, was one of the greatest games of all time. As well as lifting the World Cup as captain, Messi also won the Golden Ball award as the tournament’s best player having finished with seven goals.

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Is it a good investment?

Time will tell if the purchase is a shrewd one or if the buyer has overpaid, but the general trend is that sports memorabilia is booming as an investment class.

Football is becoming a bigger deal far beyond its traditional heartlands of Europe and South America, with the United States in particular taking more and more of an interest in the world’s most popular sport, with Messi now playing there for MLS club Inter Miami.

“(Messi is) incredibly popular and the prices for these things just rise and rise,” says sports marketing expert Tim Crow. “Collectibles in sport are just going up and up and have been for a long time. It’s one of those sectors where prices keep going up.”

How does the price compare with other sports memorabilia?

The sports memorabilia auction record was broken last May by another Argentina No 10 shirt — the one worn by the late Diego Maradona when he scored twice to knock England out in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup. The match, in Mexico City, is known for an individually brilliant goal by Maradona as well as the infamous ‘Hand of God’ incident in which he scored his side’s other one in a 2-1 victory.

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The shirt Maradona wore was owned for 35 years by Steve Hodge, the England midfielder who swapped shirts with the Argentinian at the end of that game. “I just happened to be walking down our tunnel as Maradona came walking along the Argentina tunnel,” Hodge wrote years later in his autobiography. “We looked at each other and I tugged my shirt. He nodded and so I did (get the shirt) — it was pure chance.”

Hodge says he slipped the shirt into his bag, aware of the anger towards Maradona in the England dressing room for the handball incident, and that it stayed in his attic until 2002 when he loaned it to the UK’s National Football Museum. Last year it was sold, also at Sotheby’s, for £7.1million to a mystery buyer who has still not been identified.

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For sport in general rather than football, that record was broken a few months later by a basketball jersey Michael Jordan wore in the 1998 NBA Finals series — that was sold for £8.85million. That season was known as the ‘Last Dance’ as Jordan won his sixth NBA championship before retiring for a second time.

Sotheby’s was hoping to beat that record, and indeed drummed up the hype by sending a press release to journalists predicting a bid in excess of $10million.

Why has Messi sold these shirts?

While sweaty old shirts once lingered in attics before being dug out and sold at auction to create Steve Hodge’s pension, these days things are a bit more calculated. “There’s not much that Messi does that isn’t thought through carefully in advance,” says Crow.

There were multiple partners involved in this auction, from Sotheby’s to sports app AC Momento, which “in addition to their mobile app for sports fans, partners with high-profile athletes (like Messi) to help manage their match-worn memorabilia collections”. Messi has a commercial partnership with AC Momento. The rationale seems fairly straightforward — to make lots of cash.

A portion of the proceeds from the auction will be donated to “UNICAS Project, led by Sant Joan de Deu (SJD) Barcelona Children’s Hospital with the support of Leo Messi Foundation, to meet the needs of children suffering from rare diseases” — a hospital in Messi’s adopted hometown in Spain that his foundation has worked with before. The amount being donated has not been revealed.

Isn’t Messi already enormously wealthy?

Oh yes. Unlike in European leagues, salaries in Major League Soccer are released publicly, so we know Messi will make $20,446,667 in guaranteed compensation in the calendar year 2023, with a base salary of $12million.

This figure does not include performance bonuses, which are thought to take his salary such deeper into the twenties of millions of dollars. More significantly this does not include a sizeable equity stake in the MLS club, the value of which has gone up substantially since his arrival in the summer.

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Messi reportedly earned €41million (£35.3m; $43.2m) after taxes with Paris Saint-Germain, where he played the previous two seasons, and was earning huge sums by the time he left Barcelona for the French club.

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He also has many lucrative commercial deals with companies including sportswear giant Adidas and cryptocurrency firm Socios.

Does anyone else have any of his World Cup shirts?

We know of at least one that is in another player’s possession. There is a long tradition of footballers swapping shirts at the end of matches, and less-famous players pursuing those of the sport’s glamorous names.

While one shirt from that 2-1 win against Australia is in the collection, another shirt Messi wore that day last December is in the hands of Cameron Devlin, a defender who was in the Australia squad but did not play in any of their four matches at the tournament.

“I went on (the pitch) and consoled all the boys first and then shook Messi’s hand,” said Devlin, who plays for Hearts in Scotland’s top division. “No one had said anything so I just tried my luck and he said, ‘I’ll see you inside’. I definitely wanted one of the other boys to have the opportunity first, but no one took it, so I thought, ‘Why not?’.”

Will Messi play at the 2026 World Cup to rebuild his collection?

Nobody quite knows for sure. His contract in Miami runs until the end of their 2025 season — MLS seasons run for the calendar year, ending in December — with an option to extend for 2026.

He would turn 39 during the 2026 World Cup, which will be hosted by the U.S., Mexico and Canada, making him two years older than Cristiano Ronaldo was when he played for Portugal in last year’s version. Messi has previously ruled out the idea but recently sounded more equivocal in an interview with French news outlet L’Equipe: “Considering the age I will be at that time it seems difficult, but we’ll see.”

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(Top photo: Julian Finney via Getty Images)

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