The shirt worn by American basketball legend Michael Jordan with the Chicago Bulls during the NBA finals in 1998 has been auctioned for $10 million. That is according to auction house Sotheby’s, which supervised the sale, the highest amount ever deposited for a sports item.
The uniform yielded much more than the New York auction house had estimated. Connoisseurs had estimated the value of the shirt at 3 to 5 million dollars.
According to Bram Wachter of Sotheby’s, the high price is due to “the name and the incomparable legacy of Michael Jordan, which is still relevant 25 years after his career”. It’s a shirt Jordan wore in the 1997-98 season that is central to the Netflix documentary The Last Dance.
The $10 million for Jordan’s shirt is more than the amount paid for the shirt footballer Diego Maradona wore in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final against England when he scored with the hand, the ‘hand of God’ as he himself later said. That yielded about 9.3 million dollars.