In modern football everything has a price. Not least the sofa which used to grace the manager’s office at Liverpool’s Melwood training facility. When, back in 2021, the club moved to their new premises in Kirkby, the contents of the old site were not quietly dispatched to the local authority tip. They were put up for sale online.

From the sign that hung on the IT department door to a framed picture of the club’s least auspicious former manager Roy Hodgson, it was all auctioned off. And the sofa, where visitors seeking a moment or two of Jürgen Klopp’s time would once perch, went for £1,700.

“Toilet doors, signs, clocks, it was a massive sale,” recalls David Convery, head of sporting memorabilia at Graham Budd Auctions who organised the event – and in the process raised more than £370,000 for the Liverpool FC Foundation. “The fact is, for football fans, anything related to a club they support, they’ll buy it.”

It is not a phenomenon restricted to Merseyside. Never mind fine art, racehorses or fancy watches, since the first organised sale of football memorabilia back in 1989 – when Christie’s sold a stash of items associated with the Arsenal player Alex James for £50,000 – no area of collecting has been on such a prodigious upward trajectory. The global sport memorabilia market is expected to grow in value to £178 billion by 2032, up from £20 billion in 2021.

There was a hint as to how the market is going in a sale at Sotheby’s last week. The gilt-edged Bond Street saleroom, renowned for bringing down the hammer on works by Picasso and Van Gogh, Stradivari and Chippendale, was given over to the auction of all 24 of the lockers used by the first-team players across 20 years at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu Stadium.

These were not distinguished pieces of furniture. Constructed of plastic, steel and fabric, similar items could be picked up from the centre aisle at Lidl for about £20. But at Sotheby’s the reserve price on each was set at £10,000-£20,000. And the simple reason was these were lockers sprinkled with stardust. Up for sale were the very cupboards in which David Beckham used to keep his cologne, Gareth Bale his golf clubs and Zinedine Zidane whatever it was he kept in his locker – though whatever it was commentators reckoned it was game-changing.

According to George North, Sotheby’s director, it was a sale that provided “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for football fans and collectors from around the world to cherish a piece of Real Madrid’s legacy”.

Because, like the Melwood sale, it is that connection, not the intrinsic value of the objects themselves, that matters.

“I don’t think there are people out there forming collections of lockers,” says North. “But we believe the growing market in sport is because sport is in many ways the last bastion of things that bring us together in the live moment. Madrid have 500 million fans worldwide for whom those moments matter. Artefacts associated with those moments represent cultural assets, in the same way Napoleon’s chair from Waterloo does.”

And nothing speaks of such a live moment quite as vociferously as the match-worn shirt. At every match these days, young fans can be seen flourishing pre-made cardboard signs asking for their hero’s shirt. Though the simple joy of connection is often not the principal motive behind the request: in many cases bits of kit handed over are immediately put up by parents for sale on eBay. How much collectors are prepared to pay for such items, however, depends not just on who the player was, but what they did while wearing them.

“Sport is now a social media phenomenon,” says Brendan Hawkes, the director of sports sales for Sotheby’s in the United States. “Shared video footage of an incident can make the moments part of the cultural lexicon. And that unquestionably adds value.”

He cites the sale of Diego Maradona’s shirt from the 1986 World Cup quarter-final, which was auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2022 for nearly £7 million.

“The point is, that was the ‘hand of God’ shirt, the very shirt he wore when he scored perhaps the most notorious goal in football history,” says Hawkes. “If he had won the game with a penalty, that shirt would be worth half as much. If that. The value came from the notoriety, from the story.”

Industry ‘riddled with questionable practices’

It also came from the provenance of the item. It was put up for sale by Steve Hodge, the England player who had the foresight to swap shirts with the Argentina captain after the match. Sometimes, particularly on less formal selling platforms, there can be no such certainty. In 2019 a conman called David Rennie was jailed for six years after it was revealed he had pocketed more than £1 million in a five-year career selling shirts, balls and boots online. But these had no attendant sprinkling of stardust. They were merely replica kits bought from his local shop on which he had forged signatures and added fake authenticity certificates, which he would flog for up to £700 apiece.

“This is a space riddled with questionable practices, there’s a lot of foul play and fraud,” says Hawkes. “At Sotheby’s we authenticate through a system of photo matching. We have the gold standard on this. But you still get items that have to be sold solely on an assumption of provenance. We recently had for sale Michael Jordan’s shoes he gave to a ball boy in 1992. There were no photos available of that transaction. You have to take it on trust.”

Indeed, when engaging in the market, Convery offers this advice. “Buyer beware. If it’s too good to be true, it usually is,” he says. “I have seen at least a dozen Lionel Messi match-worn World Cup final shirts on the market. Well, the maximum he could have worn is two. So the chances are what you are being offered has been nowhere near Messi.”

But even if they can be absolutely certain of its origin, the question for anyone making such a purchase remains this: will such items increase in value? And for buyers does that matter?

“The general discourse around collecting anything is emotion comes first, investment second,” says North.

Convery agrees. “Yes, emotion is uppermost,” he says. “There’s some amazing collections out there that the owners just wouldn’t want to sell. Shirts framed beautifully, hanging in man caves, giving the owners bragging rights: that’s the value for the collector. Most are collecting for themselves.”

Not least, he says, in the market of match-day programmes. Such publications constantly change hands. But those prepared to pay for individual items are doing so to fill in gaps in their collections, not as a financial investment. The broadcaster Michael Crick, for instance, has a collection of Manchester United programmes dating back to 1910, which has consumed a significant chunk of his time and capital over the years.

“I sometimes think what the hell have I done?” says Crick. “Only yesterday I bought a Huddersfield vs United programme from 1951 which was one of about 50 I have missing since the war. It cost me £51. Ridiculous really. Nobody would buy my collection in its entirety. And the only people who collect these days are elderly nerds like me. It is the literal definition of a dying market.”

Moore’s World Cup-winning shirt is holy grail

Convery, though, adds a caveat. While emotion may be the engine in memorabilia purchases, investment is often a by-product. He cites the example of the comedian Nick Hancock, who bought Sir Stanley Matthews’s 1953 FA Cup-winning medal for £20,000 in 2001 and sold it in 2014 for £220,000. Ten years on, Convery reckons, he would expect it to raise double that. At least.

But even so, that would be nothing compared to the sort of sums a similarly historic sporting artefact would achieve in the US. By way of example, while Beckham’s Real Madrid locker went for more than double its reserve price of £20,000, Kobe Bryant’s LA Lakers cupboard was sold in August this year for more than £2 million. Even Maradona’s shirt – which achieved the largest sum ever handed over in this country for a bit of football memorabilia – comes up short when compared to what is paid in New York.

“When the TV series The Last Dance came out, just a few weeks after it aired, one of Michael Jordan’s game jerseys went for £10.1 million,” says Hawkes.

Though there is one item in Britain, Convery reckons, that might match the prices achieved on the American market were it ever to find its way on to the market. This is the holy grail of English football memorabilia.

“Bobby Moore’s World Cup-winning No 6 shirt,” he says. “Nobody knows where it is, what happened to it, if it is even in existence. But that would get millions. That would be the shirt. I could retire if I ever had that up for sale.”

Most expensive sports auction items in history

Babe Ruth’s jersey, 1932 – £18.1m

The baseball jersey that legend Ruth wore in game three of the 1932 World Series, when he “called the shot” (hitting a home run after pointing to exactly where he wanted to hit it) sold for a record £18.1 million in August 2024.

Topps Mickey Mantle card, 1952 – £10.02m

Staying with baseball and the trading card of Yankees icon Mantle went for £10.02 million in 2022.

Jordan’s ‘Last Dance’ jersey, 1998 – £8.02m

The jersey the great Michael Jordan wore in the game-one loss to Utah Jazz on the way to the Chicago Bulls’ sixth NBA title win in eight years – in the season now famously known as the side’s “Last Dance” – went for £8.02 million in 2022.

Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ jersey, 1986 – £7.14m

In 2002, Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” shirt was sold for a record-breaking £7,142,500 after a two-week auction during which the price almost doubled in the final nine minutes – this despite the late Argentina icon’s own daughter having disputed its authenticity.

‘Olympic Manifesto’, 1892 –£7m

The hand-written manifesto by Pierre de Coubertin, outlining his vision for the modern Games, smashed existing records for memorabilia in 2019.

Messi’s World Cup jerseys, 2022 – £6.12m

Six of the seven shirts worn by Lionel Messi on Argentina’s World Cup-winning run in 2022 fetched £6.12 million at a Sotheby’s auction in 2023.