SOME money-chaser followed Lionel Messi around Qatar’s World Cup dressing rooms snatching up his dropped Argentina shirts and began counting his treasure trove.
Perhaps they will have been washed, dried and ironed.
But they are definitely about to be laundered now — money laundered, that is — when they are auctioned by Sotheby’s, who estimate the six shirts will go for £8million.
It isn’t as though the World Cup hero needs a few zillion pesos (so abject is the value of the peso that the newly-elected president is about to change Argentina’s currency to the mighty US dollar) and I can only guess that the shirts are his property and not that of his football association or Fifa.
So, who could afford to buy them wholesale?
Cristiano Ronaldo for one, although it’s doubtful he’d hang them in his museum in Madeira.
More likely he’d burn them all.
Qatar might. After all, £8m is far less than a day’s gas profits to the Emirate.
And half-a-dozen shirts would be a fitting memento of the weeks it was the talk of the world.
Forget that Hamas leaders are holed up there and remember captain Messi and his two goals in that memorable final against France.
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But sweat-stained shirts are rather a comedown from the world’s greatest competition unless the Emir fancies a footer museum in pure marble. No problem heating it, either.
Perhaps there will be competition among billionaire football fanatics or oil state billionaires who wish to impress visiting dignitaries because, after all, it’s cheapo furnishing compared with Leonardo’s painting Salvator Mundi which was sold for nearly £400m to Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
What’s eight million quid to the owner of Newcastle United among his many treasures?
But he might well be put off hanging six pieces of blue and white washing won in a neighbouring land that he seemingly despises.
Second thoughts, possibly one shirt per palace. In the end maybe not a single owner but six, though neither on eBay nor going cheap on Walthamstow Market.
I wouldn’t give them house room even if I could. I don’t keep things, I prefer to pass them to charity.
Even my husband’s shirts hang on the garage wall, not the interior wall of our house!
Because the whole sale is pre-meditated by someone chasing money for the slightest amount of work — “spivs” used to be the slang — it is tainted.
Whereas Steve Hodge’s sale of Maradona’s “Hand of God” shirt is almost wholesome: Not quite though because the former England midfield did eventually sell it for £7.4m.
Hodge, then with Nottingham Forest, swapped shirts with Argentina’s other superstar after he had scored both goals that knocked England out of the World Cup in Mexico in 1986.
He loaned it to the National Football Museum in Manchester for 35 years before yielding to temptation to sell it for what turned out to be a sports memorabilia world record at auction.
It happens that West Ham own three of the most valuable pieces of English football memorabilia, the 1966 World Cup medals of Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters.
They are so valuable they have been in a bank vault for the past 12 years.
We are only able to show them off on rare occasions because of insurance difficulties.
But, rest easy, we have no plans to auction our family jewels, least of all out of the country.
The uncomfortable truth, anyway, is that the amount wouldn’t buy a first-rate player.
Sports memorabilia has become a huge business, calculated to be worth somewhere over £23billion in the past year.
For collectors it is simply irresistible.
West Ham people are still buying into Moore — 57 years after he led England to the World Cup triumph and 30 years after he sadly passed away.
It is the greatest tribute to a great man.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to the shirt Hodge handed over to Maradona?
