It is the most famous moment in English football. Bobby Moore, the England captain, hoisted on the shoulders of his teammates, holding the World Cup trophy aloft in 1966.
While the moment was captured on camera and preserved for posterity, the red England shirt the centre-half was wearing, with the number six on the back, has been lost – and Moore’s ex-wife is urging its current owner to return it.
Tina Moore, the West Ham defender’s first wife, has called on the private buyer who has the shirt to return the part of footballing history. She told the Daily Mail that the last time she saw the shirt was in her attic at their home in Chigwell, Essex.
“I would really love to get that shirt back where it belongs – with me, with my family, and with the nation, for everyone to have a chance to look at it and marvel at Bobby’s achievement,” she said.
Tina, who was married to Bobby for 24 years, said the shirt was kept in a bag at their home. When Bobby was dying of cancer in 1992, their daughter Roberta brought his trophies, medals and caps for him to hold.
However, the collection did not include his England shirt, and Tina, 79, who got his football memorabilia in their divorce in 1986, then spent years looking for it. She is bemused at how the shirt vanished from their possession.
The mystery was partially solved in 2021 when the Football Association phoned Roberta, 58, and said: “Your father’s shirt has been found.” They said that it was in the hands of a private buyer, whose identity remains a secret. It is unclear how many times it may have changed hands since they last saw it in the 1980s.
“It was a huge shock and at first totally baffling,” Roberta told the Mail. “The shirt belongs to my mother and she had been looking for it for years. Now out of the blue they were telling us about some private buyer and it had been ‘found’?”
She added: “It was all very strange. The information was vague. The shirt had been ‘found at a general auction of an unknown deceased person’. It was hard to comprehend. How does the shirt go from being tucked in a bag in my mother’s attic to an auction of a deceased person?”
Moore played more than 100 times for England and, in a career that spanned more than 20 years, appeared nearly 550 times for West Ham. He played 124 games for Fulham before brief spells in the United States and Denmark.
He was awarded an OBE in the aftermath of the World Cup triumph, still the England men’s team’s only major trophy win since its foundation, and became the first footballer to win BBC Sports Personality of the Year. He is remembered with a statue outside Wembley Stadium. He died in 1993 aged 51.
When the family were alerted by the FA to the shirt’s whereabouts, they were told that it had been authenticated by an expert used by Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses.
Tina believes the shirt went missing in the 1990s, after trying and failing to find it in 1998. She is unsure how it happened.
“The divorce deeply affected me. It was a terrible time of my life, I was in turmoil. I put all my valuables into a bank vault and thought at the time that all the shirts were included, but I discovered much later that they weren’t. So we just don’t know what happened to them,” she said.
An FA spokesperson said: “Bobby Moore is an England hero. It would be wonderful if there was a way of finding his historic World Cup-winning shirt and putting it on display for the nation.”
