Pel\u00e9\u2019s iconic blue No 10 shirt from the 1958 World Cup final is expected to become one of the most expensive football artefacts ever sold after being put up for auction.<\/p>\n
The Brazilian was 17 when he scored two goals in the 5-2 win over Sweden to secure the Sele\u00e7\u00e3o\u2019s first World Cup and write his name into football lore. Now Sotheby\u2019s expects the shirt\u2019s rich history will lead to it fetching more than $6m (\u00a34.5m) when it goes under the hammer in New York next month.<\/p>\n
The shirt worn by Pel\u00e9 was auctioned by Christie\u2019s in London in 2004 when it sold for \u00a359,000. Photograph: Sotheby\u2019s\/AP<\/p>\n
That figure would put it, as a single item, behind only the Argentina jersey worn by Diego Maradona when he scored the Hand of God goal against England at Mexico 1986, which sold for $9.3m in 2022. A collection of six Lionel Messi shirts from the Qatar World Cup went for $7.8m in 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe shirt itself is in extraordinary condition for something that\u2019s nearly 70 years old,\u201d Brendan Hawkes, Sotheby\u2019s vice president of sport strategy, said. \u201cIt\u2019s just a really vibrant blue colour with the Brazil yellow on the back.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that struck me when I actually first handled it was how small it was. Pel\u00e9 wasn\u2019t a very large man and he wore this shirt when he was 17. He was a lean young kid at that point, and if you look at the pictures from that match, the shirt is actually quite small on him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pel\u00e9 finished the tournament with six goals in four matches, and remains the youngest player to appear in a World Cup final. After the game he gave the shirt to his roommate Didi, and it stayed in Didi\u2019s family until 1993, when it was donated to the Museu dos Esportes Edvaldo Alves Santa Rosa in Brazil. The museum offered the shirt at auction in London in 2004, where it sold for \u00a359,000. Such is the boom in sports memorabilia that it is expected to fetch nearly 100 times that amount by the time bidding closes on 16 July.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have seen just a ton of growth in this market over the last five years,\u201d said Hawkes. \u201cMaradona\u2019s Hand of God shirt is still the high watermark for a single football shirt but we\u2019re placing this in the same orbit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pel\u00e9 revealed in his autobiography that a few of his teammates worried that wearing blue against Sweden would be a \u201cbad omen\u201d. \u201cBut Dr Paulo, the head of the delegation, turned it round cleverly,\u201d Pel\u00e9 wrote. \u201cHe said blue would be lucky, as it was the colour of our patron saint, Nossa Senhora de Aparecida, and it had served previous teams well.\u201d And so it proved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pel\u00e9\u2019s iconic blue No 10 shirt from the 1958 World Cup final is expected to become one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":710808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-710807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}