Thank you Ivan for writing this beautiful article for Coolligan!
'Rarities'
This word, 'rarities', always had to do with music and, more specifically, with the genre of B-sides when the 'singles' existed. We speak, of course, of another time, of another language, of other tastes. The wonderful charm of musical rarities is also, a charm, in the fabulous world of soccer jerseys and, if they are from before, even better.
And it is that uniting these two concepts, clothing and football, is to reveal an immense satisfaction for being like that: studiously distracted, hopelessly hooked on the colors of football.
End of the 70s and Spain is coming out of the black and white of forty years of atrocious dictatorship. Some, therefore, no longer live here. This is the case of my grandfather Luis, exiled in Biarritz, France. He satisfies his grandson Ivan's irresistible soccer passion, barely covered by AS Color, with a subscription to the amazing soccer magazine 'Onze' and the regular gift of French soccer jerseys.
When here there was only the shield sewn on a totally white garment from Madrid, striped from Atleti or a blaugrana reluctant from Barça, and which were not even found in Saldos Arias, in France the three stripes of Adidas, the proud rooster of le Coq Sportif and kidney-to-kidney advertising. So they, the T-shirts from the neighboring country, exuded modernity, they gave the color that our lives of watchword lacked, and they were a rare pleasure to wear.
In this way, and regardless of the subsequent significance, he began a collection of football clothing that will never end: hundreds of shirts for the pleasure of accumulating (we are all Diogenes) and for the pleasure of recalling with them the deeds of our ball heroes
Michel Platini's Nancy Lorraine shirt, Arsene Wenger's player Strasbourg, I have no idea who Valenciennes, Henry Michel's Nantes and Johnny Rep's St. Etienne, for example, adorned the skin of my childhood. to fit into a profile never betrayed: accumulate shirts with no other claim than to be happier.
Then, over time, the informative effect opened the doors of my recreation site and gave more meaning to this blessed madness, the passion also continued for my son Daniel, one day with Zenit, another with Lyon and tomorrow with that of Hertha in Berlin.
Because the shirts, those from then and these from now, are not just a careful piece of cloth like Pinocchio was nothing more than a carved piece of wood: they are a way of life, a transport ticket to the memory of goals scored or the imagination of so many that are yet to come that give a greater meaning to existence in this valley of pagafantas.
My last challenge, and I will also complete it successfully, is none other than to lose weight to fit (and breathe at the same time) in the shirts of my Coolligan friends. They are already my endocrinologist and the dietician that Rafa Benítez did not go to. Why did we want more...
Ivan Castello
Journalist
