BarcelonaI’m seriously considering buying a trading card album of the next World Cup. I have a few friends from my farm who have already done it. I don’t have many rational arguments to justify it, I admit. It is an irrational feeling, an idea that is born somewhere hidden inside my body, between my stomach and my heart.
Being a sports fan is an act of love. I’ve spent my whole life building rational theories to defend myself against people who don’t follow sports and criticize them. They are always people with an overbearing touch, who are heard when they speak. Of those who run away from a successful product, since they must always be special. And of course, sports are too popular. But no matter how many theories I have, in the end I realize that this passion is still very irrational. It’s that weekly return to your childhood that Javier Marías used to say.
And the trading cards are part of the memories of many generations. It’s exciting to see how in the midst of the age of digital products, so many children are having a blast opening an envelope. In fact, a lot of online games and products, like these leagues where you choose players every week, are inspired by the magic of the trading cards of a lifetime. How can the mere act of opening an envelope and seeing what comes out fill you so much? When I empty boxes of old memories, cleaning, I never get rid of the old albums. I have bundles of trading cards kept like treasures. Every time there is a scene in a movie where someone finds an old, rusty box that a child had buried with his treasures, I get excited to see that there was a chrome.
This week a 1950s baseball player Mike Mantle’s chrome broke the record for the most expensive sports item in history, selling for more than $12.5 million, surpassing the price of a Maradona shirt. It’s crazy? Of couse. Have I spent more than 50 euros on a single chrome from Sabadell from the 1920s, the kind that came in chocolate packages? Too. Have I haggled with old trading card sellers in Rome or Kyiv for trading cards from the 1960s? I have one of the Soviet Anatoli Demianenko that I really love. In fact, I look at the guy who bought Mantle’s chrome and feel a kind of sympathy, thinking that I prefer these millionaires to those who spend it on guns or partying at whatever club.
I really like that line that evaluates athletes saying “I don’t judge you by what you did with your life, I judge you by what you did with mine.” Sport, like any area of society, hides corruption, foul play and whitewashes dictatorships. But it continues to excite me so much, that now that a World Cup is coming that I am not very excited about the fact that it is being played in Qatar, where so many human rights are violated, I still value buying the album of trading cards. And seeing how my wife smiles when she sees how my eyes open, happy, if I get Felix Afena-Gyan’s chrome. And I can tell you his story.
