WC66 ENG England Number Plate For Sale

Sir Geoff Hurst has been revealed as the anonymous buyer of a 'world cup winning' registration plate - after bidding for it in his barber's in Cheltenham.

The WC66 ENG plate was one of the highest profile registrations to be sold by DVLA Personalised Registrations last year.

It coincided with the 50th anniversary of England's only World Cup success - and when Adam Griffiths auctioned it off he said he was "delighted to sell an iconic registration to clearly a true England supporter".

However, he didn't realise at the time the buyer was Sir Geoff Hurst.

Details have now emerged of how the English sporting legend, who lives in Cheltenham, ended up buying the plate - and it is only thanks to his hairdresser.

Sir Geoff said: "I went into my barber's in Cheltenham and he said he saw on the news that the WC66 ENG plate was coming up for sale.

"I'm always up for a bit of fun and I just thought 'why not' and managed to register to bid with very little time to spare."

The hat-trick hero, 75, ended up winning the auction and paid £4,346 for the registration, which is one of a number of personalised plates in his collection.

How close a series of letters or numbers are to a real name of word: if the match quality is high (and the numbers and letters are very convincing in making a popular word), the value of the registration plate will be higher. This means that a match like 5IMON, for the name Simon, will be worth a lot more than a more obscure set of letters and numbers that are not as convincing a match, such as S17 MMM for the name Sam.

The style of the plate: this means establishing if it is a new-style plate, an older-style format or if it is dateless or Irish, for instance. Other options are that it is a prefix-style plate or a suffix-style plate. New-style number plates, which have been produced since 2001, tend to be the least valuable because they are a bit less appealing to some collectors, plus the rule about not having plates that are newer than your car can also come into play, putting people off from buying a newer-style plate for their older car. Prefix-style number plates, which were in production between 1983 and 2001 can be more popular as more vehicles are entitled to have those licence numbers, and they may have fewer characters in total. Suffix-style plates, issued from 1963 to 1983 are relatively rare, which means they can attract higher prices than prefix-style plates and newer designs. Dateless number plates, also known as cherished number plates, were produced between 1903 and 1963 and are nearly always the most valuable number plate configurations; they have fewer digits and their dateless nature means that people can hide the age of their car. Irish number plates are similar to dateless number plates, especially because they don’t have a year identifier. They also tend to be cheaper than other types of vehicle registration plates.

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