Bobby Moore’s ex-wife Tina Moore has called on a private buyer who has the red England 1966 world cup shirt to return it to her. 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?”

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.”