Lothar Matthaus is exclusively admitted to Daily Mail in the famous shirt he traded in the 1986 World Cup final against Argentina with Diego Maradona, with whom he also developed a close friendship.
The former player assured that there were two occasions where he was able to make money from the sale of said shirt, including a super offer of seven million pounds -almost eight million euros-, which he finally rejected.
The former player spoke about the Argentine legend’s famous shirt in the ’86 World Cup final in Mexico, where Matthaus and West Germany lost 3-2.
Steve Hodge, the England midfielder who wore Maradona’s shirt in the quarter-finals of ‘Hand of God’, he sold the legendary shirt in May for a world record £7.1m. He called it, friends say, his ‘pension fund’.
Matthaus (61 years old), who has been the ambassador for the next World Cup in Qatar since November, was also tempted to sell the framed shirt that hangs in his house and that he traded with Maradona at the Azteca Stadium for a large sum of money to preserve. the financial future of their four children. However, he did not.
‘No,’ he said without blinking, after returning the shirt to the Argentine ambassador in Madrid last month. “In 36 years, I never thought: ‘I want money for this shirt. It is a pleasure for me to give it back to the people of Argentina.’
“Diego is the greatest of my time. No one in the world has done what he has done with a soccer ball. Diego is a god in Argentina, that’s why it’s special to give them a shirt,” he concluded. In fact, on two occasions he was offered huge sums for said shirt, but he always refused to sell it.
Source: La Verdad
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