I’ll bet someone else’s shirt that Diego Maradona’s is real…

It is, they always say, a short playing career, and you need to make your money while you can – an observation about professional football that was perhaps more relevant in the days when retired strikers might be found running a struggling pub or cabbing in the early hours than now, when the likes of Ronaldo, Messi and Neymar bestride the grassy sward.

The midfielder Steve Hodge belongs more to the former era than that of the Midas-age players whose revenue from image rights and endorsements alone would keep them in gold taps and gigantic watches for the rest of their lives – indeed, even Hodge’s most lucrative transfer, from Nottingham Forest to Leeds United in 1991, didn’t break the million-pound barrier.

But Hodge made one exceptionally brilliant business decision, on a day that he might not otherwise have deemed his finest. In 1986, in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City and the quarter-final of the World Cup, he swapped shirts with Diego Maradona. Those of us inexorably heading towards our free bus passes will remember the agony of that day, England’s 2-1 defeat not merely painful but cosmically unjust, the first of Maradona’s two goals scored courtesy, as the Argentinian so tauntingly, so hubristically put it, with help from the hand of God. Did the fact that Hodge’s misfired flick set up that infamous goal spur him on? Did he think: sod it, I might as well get something out of this crappy day?

Well, now he has: possibly, indeed, £4m, if estimates of what the shirt will fetch when it is auctioned by Sotheby’s in May are to be believed. A nice nest egg for Hodge, who clearly realised he had something special when he entitled his 2010 memoir The Man with Maradona’s Shirt.

Although it was not ever thus: in 2002, my