Maradona’s half-smoked cigar and Toni Kroos’ socks: Inside the lair of a soccer memorabilia collector

If there is one item which sums up Gabriel Bustamante’s extraordinary dedication to collecting football memorabilia, it is a half-used Diego Maradona cigar.Maradona had just lost a 2019 play-off final with the Mexican second-division side he was coaching at the time, Dorados de Sinaloa, when Bustamante spotted him smoking the cigar on his way out of the stadium. When Maradona threw what was left of it under the team bus, Bustamante got down on his knees to rescue the relic smoked by El Diego.The Argentinian asked what the collector was doing, to which he replied “Diego, it had your DNA — I had to conserve it”. Maradona simply turned to his assistant and said: “This guy needs more therapy than me”. He gave Bustamante the sunglasses he was wearing, too.A few hours in the company of Bustamante, 59, is enough to make you realise he has hundreds of stories like this among his 20,000-strong collection of match-worn football shirts, boots, pennants, trophies, books, medals and more — all stored in a basement in Monterrey, Mexico.There is the Andres Iniesta shirt from his early days at Barcelona. There are the socks Toni Kroos wore on his final La Liga appearance for Real Madrid — complete with grass stains that Bustamante makes us cross-check against pictures from that game. He has some of the Rolex watches the late Maradona gifted his Dorados players (the man himself famously liked to wear one on each wrist).Diego Maradona’s half-smoked cigar and sunglasses (Tomas Hill Lopez-Menchero/The Athletic)There is even a letter written by then FIFA president Joao Havelange to his CONCACAF counterpart in 1986, asking him to transfer $25,000 to Jack Warner, head of the Trinidad and Tobago FA at the time, to “settle the momentary difficulties of that federation”.“My biggest passion is telling stories about football,” Bustamante tells The Athletic. “I like finding out about history and telling it to others, speaking about it and sharing it. I want new generations to learn about the idols of the 1960s, of the 1950s: Don Alfredo Di Stefano, Ferenc Puskas, George Best.”