A long-sleeved white England shirt worn by Roger Hunt during the 1966 World Cup sold for £11,000 at auction, fetching a price that auctioneer Andrew Aldridge attributed partly to the timing — a World Cup running while the gavel fell.
Hunt wore the shirt on 20 July 1966 in a group-stage match against France at Wembley. He scored both goals in a 2-0 win, part of a tournament in which he appeared in every England game and finished with three goals, helping Alf Ramsey’s side navigate the group stage before going on to beat West Germany 4-2 in the final.
For a player whose contributions to England’s only major tournament triumph were quietly essential, £11,000 is a modest figure in the memorabilia economy. Hunt was England’s joint-top scorer at the 1966 World Cup, level with Geoff Hurst on three goals — though Hurst’s came in a single afternoon, all in the final, and his match-worn shirt from that day has commanded sums orders of magnitude higher. Hunt’s group-stage shirt tells a different story: the workmanlike goals that got England out of the group, scored by a striker who never sought the spotlight and whose Liverpool career — 285 goals in 492 appearances — was built on positioning and persistence rather than flair.
Aldridge, whose Wiltshire-based firm conducted the sale, noted a local connection that gave the auction added resonance. Hunt, born in Warrington, spent most of his National Service in the Devizes area and turned out for Devizes Town during his time in the county.
“As a lover of football, selling this is a great honour,” Aldridge said. “As a Wiltshire company, Hunt had a strong connection to this town, it’s a really cool thing.”
Aldridge suggested the sale price was buoyed by the World Cup coinciding with the auction window. “Our boys didn’t bring it home this time but we go again in four years time,” he added — a reference to England’s elimination from the ongoing tournament, which ended whatever hope existed of a 2026 squad matching the achievement of Hunt and his teammates sixty years on.
Hunt died in September 2021 at the age of 83. He was Liverpool’s all-time leading goalscorer for nearly five decades until Mohamed Salah surpassed him in 2023. During the 1965-66 season, the one that culminated in the World Cup, Hunt scored 31 league goals for Liverpool and was an automatic selection for Ramsey’s squad. He started all six of England’s matches, scoring twice against France and once against Mexico in the group phase.
The shirt’s provenance — a group-stage garment rather than one worn in the final — places it in a specific tier of memorabilia. It is not the shirt from the 4-2 win over West Germany, the one stained with Wembley grass and immortalized in British sporting mythology. It is the shirt from a Tuesday afternoon in July, a functional 2-0 win over France watched by 47,000 spectators, when Hunt did what he always did: found the right position, twice, and said very little about it afterward.
That it sold for £11,000 rather than a figure with more zeros reflects that distinction. The market, for all its sentimentality, is precise about provenance. A group-stage shirt from a player who scored the goals that mattered before the goals everyone remembers is worth something — just not everything.
Sources: