Footballer Diego Maradona spotted wearing a Hublot

Diego Maradona had many rituals, but few were as consistent as his two-watch habit. The Argentine football legend maintained that keeping one timepiece on local time and a second locked to Buenos Aires was a matter of staying connected to home — wherever in the world his coaching career or celebrity took him. In this pitchside sighting, both wrists carry what appear to be the same reference: the Hublot Big Bang Unico Sapphire set with 48 baguette-cut diamonds, retailing at six figures apiece.

The Big Bang Unico Sapphire is built around a monoblock case machined entirely from transparent sapphire crystal — a material with a Vickers hardness of roughly 2,000 HV, second only to diamond. The 45mm case, lugs, and even the pushers are rendered in this material, making the watch a showcase for Hublot's in-house HUB1242 UNICO column-wheel flyback chronograph movement, which floats visibly inside the case. The 48 baguette-cut diamonds are channel-set into the bezel, adding an estimated 3.00 carats of VS-grade stones around the sapphire perimeter — an exercise in deliberate contradiction, hard stone framing hard stone.

From a collector's standpoint, the sapphire-cased Big Bang occupies a specific and enduring niche. First introduced in 2016, the Sapphire series demonstrated that large-format sport watches could achieve full transparency without sacrificing structural integrity. The diamond-set variant narrows the audience further: it is neither purely technical nor purely jewellery, which actually enhances its appeal among high-net-worth collectors who resist easy categorisation. Secondary market liquidity is reasonable given limited production numbers.

Maradona's relationship with Hublot was well documented — the brand outfitted him during his tenure as coach of Dorados de Sinaloa in Mexico's second division, visible here via the Charly-branded training top. The dual-watch configuration is consistent across dozens of documented appearances throughout the final decade of his life, with Hublot references dominating both wrists.

At $100,000 per piece, two identical examples represent a $200,000 wrist stack worn to a lower-division football press conference — a detail that tells you everything you need to know about how Maradona approached the concept of occasion.