There’s a blue shirt sitting in a vault somewhere worth $9.28 million. But before it became the most expensive piece of athletic memorabilia in history, it was supposedly stitched together in a Mexican street market in about 48 hours.
This is the wild backstory that filmmaker Phidel McCabe decided was worth a documentary. On June 22, 1986, Diego Maradona wore that shirt when he scored two goals against England at the Azteca Stadium—the infamous “Hand of God” and what many call the “Goal of the Century.” The problem? Argentina’s original blue kit had been swapped away in an earlier match against Uruguay, and they needed a replacement fast. According to team accounts, that’s when goalkeeper Hector Miguel Zelada suggested heading to Tepito, Mexico City’s legendary market district where, as McCabe puts it, “you can find literally anything.”
What unfolds in McCabe’s documentary, El Diez: Made in Tepito, is equal parts sports history and working-class heroism. The crew didn’t have time for precision. They stitched on their own badges. They ironed on American football numbers—which is why those glittery digits look so unconventional in every photo. The whole operation feels impossibly DIY for a World Cup quarter-final, yet somehow it worked. Maradona’s two most iconic moments were literally wearing a rushed garment assembled by street vendors in a Mexico City mercado.
What makes this story resonate beyond the soccer circles is what it reveals about whose labor actually shapes sporting legend. McCabe and artist Ana Xhopa (a Zapotec creator from San Blas Atempa in Oaxaca who created a commemorative mural on Republica de Argentina street in Mexico City) both emphasize that this wasn’t just about Maradona. It was about the merchants, the craftspeople, the neighborhood resistance that made it possible. As Xhopa notes, it matters that a national team won at an international event “while wearing a so-called ‘pirate’ jersey.” It matters that those workers are acknowledged.
The story has its doubters, even in Mexico City itself. But McCabe’s investment in uncovering it—interviewing everyone from Zelada to market vendors to the artists documenting it now—suggests that wrestling with uncertainty is part of the point. In a sports world increasingly dominated by corporate endorsement deals and mega-budgets, there’s something worth celebrating in a $9 million artifact that started as an improvisation born from necessity and ingenuity. Forty years later, the people of Tepito deserve to know their stitches are still making history.
