- MUNDIAL - The Hat-Trick
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- Stories About... Treasure
Image: A Store Like 94
We’re all suckers for a bit of memorabilia. Pennants, posters, masks, figurines, and bootleg shirts. Kitschy flags and great jackets. It’s a weird and wonderful sub-genre of football shite, one that often leads to obsession. You could end up with a garage full of the stuff, like Seb—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This week, we’re going on a treasure hunt; flea markets, warehouses, eBay search engines, Etsy dropshippers, the lot. We’re bringing you a carnival of Tat, from Stormtroopers kicking footballs to wacky fan shirts and Luka Modrić bedsheets. Enjoy
FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME
Loot digging in Turin, Barcelona, Naples and more with A Store Like 94…
Interview: MUNDIAL, Images: A Store Like 94
You’ll have seen A Store Like 94 on Instagram. It’s an account dedicated to bootlegs, knock-offs, and fan memorabilia from all around the world. We’ve spoken to its founder, Josh, before about stuff like the David Seaman Sainsbury’s shopping bag he found in his attic. God, that was good. Josh is a man obsessed with finding tat, and when it came to this edition of The Hat-Trick, we knew we had to ask him about his recent tours of European cities, scouring flea markets and trying to understand the football culture he was in, between bobbleheads and badges...
“So what I call the ‘Tour de Tat’ is basically just: once a month, I pick one of the best European football cities, and then head out there for a long weekend, and try hit up as many flea markets and talk to people that actually live in the city, meet up with them and gain an inside knowledge. I’m trying to grab as much football memorabilia as possible in the time available.
“I'm trying to connect with artists in every city as well and then also trying to create some art or like getting a tattoo or getting a sign painted. Something that kind of encapsulates what the city's football culture is. I’m getting Naranjito, the mascot for Athletic Club, as a tattoo in Bilbao next.
“I’m a Palace fan, so I thought red and blue would work for both!”
“Since I’ve been a kid, treasure hunting has been what my whole business is built on, but in my personal life, I do loads of foraging for things like wild mushrooms. And in my full-time job, I'm doing this, where I’m always hunting for stuff anyway. So, I'm obviously a natural hunter-gatherer!
“I found a few really lovely old Diego Maradona bits in Napoli. Things I hadn't seen before—like there was a really beautiful scarf from when they'd first won the scudetto.
“One of the things I do is that I have a look at the main selling platform that’s being used in that country, whether that's vintage or eBay or, like, Facebook Marketplace. And then I just use Google Translate and I contact people in the city while I'm there and see if there's a possibility I can meet up with them.
“When travelling to a city, I make sure I do the homework. Like, I’m planning to go to Marseille next, and on my Google Maps, I've already got, like, 40 pins. So I don't go in blind. I directly message people there. I get in contact with people who own shops. I tell them I'm coming. I tell them what I do, and a lot of the time, people are really happy to share their city.
“The bright checkerboards and Japan flags made the shirt appear very surreal hanging up on the wall among rack after rack of black and white striped memorabilia.”
“Some of the best bits I got in Torino were actually all around the city. There's these second-hand warehouses, like 20 of them. So when I got there, the biggest flea market of the month was a complete washout, but then my plan b was to hit all these warehouses. I just jumped on a bus and went from A to B to C, going around the city in the rain on the bus.
“And in every place, there’d be at least one great bit of Juventus merch. It kind of kept me going, you know what I mean? Like, I'd find a really good scarf and a flag, and I'd be like, cool, I'm gonna go to the next one and go to the next one. I'd find a book, and that’d keep my spirits up.
“In Naples, I met Alessandro Tione [who runs Religione Monoteista on Instagram] and another guy called Gaetano who's recently started selling merch, and they're both so proud of their city. They really made time in their day to come and meet me and show me around. Gaetano chucked me on the back of his motorbike.
“We drove out of the city, and he was taking me through all the neighbourhoods and showing me the places with the best Maradona shrines. He was like, you wouldn't come here if I wasn't with you because this is where all the drug dealers live.
“Then the last time I was in Barcelona, there's a guy, Joel, who runs Real Vintage Football Shirts. Again he took me to the flea markets, but I also met all his mates. We went out clubbing. I had a really good weekend with him, not just combing markets and stalls. The sign writers in Torino were really lovely. I had a sign commissioned from them, picked it up when I was there and then when I was leaving, they were like, do you want to come for lunch?
“And I was like, yeah, I'd love to. Next thing I know, I'm in this really lovely Italian restaurant, where we had this simple but beautiful lunch. And I wouldn't have gone there if I hadn't been with them, and that was the best feeling I had that whole weekend.
“So, it's all those kinds of things that are tied in that you get when you actually meet someone instead of just going on your ones and getting a bit lost.
“The things I’m most proud of finding? I’ll always remember the buzz when I found my first Maradona mask, like the big plastic ones there with the original tags. I’ve got a smile on my face talking about it now. It was just really nice to find a bit of original merch from the glory days of when Napoli first won the league.
“Through Facebook Marketplace, I went to this old lady's house to pick up a poster. When I got there, I'd been talking through Google Translate, and then she realised I was English. She just spoke English anyway to make me comfortable. She was about, I'd probably say, her early 70s.
“And she just invited me into her house, where she had a big Maradona shrine, and I ended up buying a framed piece off her for 20 euros. She told me she actually got it signed by him. But she was like, yeah, she’d gone and made him sign a batch of posters, and as she was moving house, she’d put a load up for sale on FB Marketplace.
“One of my favourite things to find is smoking memorabilia for football. I've got this really beautiful Barcelona lighter, which is probably one of my favourite things of all time, and it’s still the only thing I always carry around in my pocket. Of course, there’s that Barcelona ashtray I found with the Figo, Hagi, Pep, and Ronaldo badges that I put on my Insta.
“In Torino, I found so many nice pendants and this old-school Kappa Juventus coach jacket I love. The maddest thing was probably this King Kazu shirt I found at a flea market. It cost me five euros, and it was fan-made, probably one of the rarest you could find. The bright checkerboards and Japan flags made the shirt appear very surreal hanging up on the wall among rack after rack of black and white striped memorabilia.
“I think the main thing with this project is I'm not trying to make people jealous or anything. That's not the point of it. I want to inspire people to believe they can go and do this, too. That it’s an achievable and real thing, and they can do it and have fun doing it; all you have to do is get stuck in and talk to people.”
If you’re reading this and don’t know how to start looking or are just nervous about talking to people you don’t know, Josh tells us his DMs are always open to people wanting to find out more. Message him, and he’ll point you in the direction of the right people in the cities he’s been to, whether that’s Turin or Barcelona or Naples or Amsterdam.
According to Josh, we all have our own Tours De Tat in us. It’s just a matter of knowing where to start.
BEING JAMES MODRIĆOVIĆ
A story of two Lukas, ten minutes, and one search engine…
Words: James Bird, Images: eBay & Etsy
Over the years, they’ve called me many things. Despite naming me James at birth, literally writing the name James on the piece of paper that means I’ll legally be known as James, my parents have ever since called me Jamie. Happy or sad, telling me my eighteenth birthday has been cancelled or how proud they are of me for being a dad: it’s Jamie. Baffling.
Then there’s Birdy, of course. When I went to watch my dad play football in parks across Wolverhampton, it would be the thing shouted through the mud and muck and fog and moss most. Birdy’s ball! Adding a ‘y’ to someone’s surname is about as 101 as it gets with nicknames, and the same thing has been shouted by every person I’ve ever shared a football pitch with since. Birdo followed, I think, after moving to London. Maybe adding an ‘o’ is more of a Southern thing. The man now known as Statman Dave regularly sends me voice notes calling me ShitBird, which isn’t very nice at all.
James, Jamie, Birdo, Birdy, ShitBird. A nightmare of suburban imagination. But, over the last few years, a new name was added to the rotation—a marquee jacket to a stale wardrobe of forgettable basics.
OH NO!
To read more about James’ search for Luka Modrić,
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I’m not sure who started calling me Modrić first; there are MUNDIAL tweets and Instagram posts about it from around 2017. It was very much an in-joke thing, I guess. I didn’t look that much like him, or at least I didn’t think I did.
But then I grew my hair out. Mostly because I became a dad and realised the only person I actually cared about impressing anymore was my daughter. It’s in the same bracket as splashing out on new cars or starting new hobbies. Maybe it’s about making sure you’re still noticed.
As the hair grew, it went from an in-joke to something more public.
I reckon 20 times in the past year, strangers have shouted “MODRIĆ!” at me. On Tube escalators on the way to work, in pub beer gardens after it’s got cold, walking down the side of astroturf pitches after a game’s finished.
Back in the day, I used to run a regular feature in MUNDIAL called Random, Collectible Shite from eBay. It was brilliant at first, but then I made it garbage by going too far and buying things like transferable tattoos and putting them on my face, and finding life-size cutouts of José Mourinho to link to my childhood. Ruined it, really. But it did used to be good. And I got really good at finding weird titbits on the internet.
So, when we decided this one would be about hunting for treasure, I combined my new nickname with my old feature. Owen gave me ten minutes to find the best and worst Luka Modrić merchandise online. And here’s how that went.
0–60 seconds
Site: eBay
Search term: Luka Modrić
Nice and simple, nice and calm, still 0–0; the first minute is an eBay light touch. And it’s common denominator fodder. Signed Real Madrid balls for £250, signed Mercurial Vapor boots for £350 (seven available—they simply cannot be real), signed shirts for £140. I'm doing backstroke in the swimming pool of late-stage capitalism, I zoom forward to page 4 of the results and get out the other side to get dry.
61–120 seconds
Site: eBay
Search term: Luka Modrić merch
Luka talks about childhood poignantly in his autobiography: how he spent his first years shepherding goats in a tiny village called Modrići, where his grandparents lived in a stone house on the slopes of mountain Velebit, before having to flee as the Croatian War of Independence rolled through the early 90s. The house was burnt down, and Luka spent much of the following years as a refugee in the coastal city of Zadar.
His autobiography is one of the results that comes up as I switch to ‘Luka Modrić merch’, and there’s further gold elsewhere. There’s a made-to-order duvet and pillow set (which instantly reminds me of my friend Chadders, who STILL has a gigantic West Brom crest painted above his childhood bedroom, STILL has West Brom crest curtains, and STILL has a West Brom duvet—all of which are appreciated by his 33-year-old wife when they go back to Wolverhampton for a night). Then there’s this weird 100-dollar note thing for five Australian dollars. I buy the 100-dollar note.
121–180 seconds
Site: eBay
Search term: Luka Modrić stocking
I remember that one of the things I used to add to my search terms was ‘stocking filler’ because it brought up all sorts of naff stuff under a fiver. Banging it in brings up this keyring, which, aside from looking nothing at all like Luka Modrić, has some nice little details.
But then I start to get stuck.
There’s not a lot else. Besides your classic cards and stickers, there’s not a lot else.
181–240 seconds
Site: Google
Search term: Luka Modrić merch / Luka Modrić funny / Luka Modrić collectables
I was expecting tea towels, scarves, clocks, pin badges, the lot. But the only other Luka Modrić ephemera I can find is this Corinthian-style figurine based on what my face looks like the morning after a series of executive-level bad decisions.
For a man who has won five Champions Leagues, captained his country of 3.8million people to consecutive World Cup finals and semifinals, and even won Tottenham Hotspur Player of the Year 2010/11, there’s a dearth of great tat around him.
“Luka Modrić, on a T-shirt style more reserved for Biggie or Tupac, sure. I’m in. I make a promise to myself that if I ever get to meet Luka, I’ll wear this.”
241–300 seconds
Site: Gchat
Search term: Well, it’s just me, Owen, and Asad chatting
The first thing Asad sends across is this trio of stickers called ‘Luka Modrić Rookie Champions League Bundle’ with a note saying, ‘This is you mate / as you've aged / like the photos of ape becoming man’. The evolution of James to Birdo to Modrić. A sorry tale of evolution that would make anyone want to believe in a Creator.
Then Owen pops up. Course he does. Have you spent any time with the man? Listened to him on the podcast? Popping up in various different forms is his thing.
Via the Celeb Cutouts Store, he’s got a life-size Modrić. Ballon d’Or Luka. Suited up. Maybe I could send it to work on Wednesdays.
361– 420 seconds
Site: Gchat
Situation: Finding the good stuff
Then we get to the 90s-style hype tee—a quintessential product of the dropshipper. Find a thing that someone will type in and turn it into a product they’ll be stupid enough to buy. Well, lucky enough for you, that person is me. Hip-hop was my first way of hearing stories outside of Wolverhampton; the first media I consumed that took me elsewhere. Mogul, the Gimlet audio documentary series about the birth of the genre, is my favourite podcast of all time. Luka Modrić, on a T-shirt style more reserved for Biggie or Tupac, sure. I’m in. I make a promise to myself that if I ever get to meet Luka, I’ll wear this.
421 seconds+
Site: Internal monologue
Search term: The soul
I turn off the stopwatch, fire up the 2018 compilation, and watch a grandmaster at work. I’ll put the 100-dollar bill up as part of a competition next week.
WHERE TWO WORLDS COLLIDE
A Sebastian Dennis White eBay treasure hunt that ticks both (pill)boxes…
Words: Seb White Images: eBay
There are secrets in Seb’s house. Only a couple of us have seen them. Two boxes. Both containing gold. Seb gold. We saw them when we used to go and pack up every single magazine by hand in his garage. The winter editions were tough, really; it was freezing out there. But then we saw the boxes. Shoebox-size. Each with a label slapped on.
WAR
FOOTBALL
“It’s been well established by now that I’m a fan of military history,” Seb told us just now. “I’ve been called Tankman and Der Panzer and a whole lot more by a whole lot of people. I could argue against it but we all know there’s no use—sometimes you just have to accept who you are.
COUGH UP!
For the rest of this story about Seb in the eBay trenches, upgrade now!
“So me being me, I naturally volunteered to go deep into eBay, go truffle hunting for the weird and wacky memorabilia that combines war and football. Books, posters, programmes, I could’ve spent hours there, and this piece could’ve been thousands of words long. Instead, here are seven of the best. Curated nuggets of gold, from Tankman to you…
An UMBRO football shirt from 1939 - By some distance the most expensive item, a snip at £14,995 plus the £5.39 for standard delivery—you’d have thought they would throw that in for free. The 1939 kit was the first year Umbro agreed to put numbers on the back of shirts, just before the Football League and Scottish League were abandoned due to the war. London clubs initially wanted to create a separate London Division when the war started, and they wanted to play [i]underneath[i] the headquarters of the FA. They backed down but did end up creating the London War Cup in 1940. Brentford won the final edition in 1942, and there was a campaign in 2013 to retrieve the cup from Stamford Bridge, where fans of The Bees claimed it was being illegally held.
A 1943 War Cup Final match ticket - A ticket from the Football League War Cup. With the FA Cup being paused, the Football League held their own competition in opposition to the London-centric one, and the Southern area final saw Arsenal beat Charlton 7-1 in front of over 75,000 at Wembley.
“Scoring a goal, making a save, or arguing about an offside was the only way you could stop yourself from cracking up.”
A copy of Picture Post magazine (15/01/44) - NORWEGIAN GIRLS PLAY MUD-FOOTBALL IN THE PARK is the tagline on the iconic Picture Post. Mud-Football was a cross between netball and football (which sounds like an awful lot of fun, to be fair), and these Norwegians exiled in London played whatever the weather in Hyde Park.
A book about Aldershot FC during the war—Jack Rollin is an expert when it comes to all things football and World War 2, and his excellent Soccer at War 1939-1945 is the definitive account. He’s the man who founded and edited, along with his daughter Glenda, The Football Yearbook, an annual and statistical bible that became football’s answer to the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. A fiend for accuracy, this book chronicles the story of his beloved Aldershot Town during the war years in granular detail. The half-time scores, results, and goal scorers for every league and cup game between ‘39 and ‘46 are included. Aldershot briefly became the best team in the country due to the number of ‘guest’ players they could call upon due to the players stationed nearby. At one point, Stan Cullis, Cliff Britton, and Joe Mercer were all together at the Army School of Physical Training nearby, so Aldershot FC fielded the entire England half-back line as guest players. The team's ties to the army have continued to this day, with inter-unit matches taking place and the Army FA being based in the town.
A postcard from a POW football match - Stalag 21A was a Prisoner of War camp in Poznan and housed primarily British, Polish and French POWs, and this image could almost be a screenshot from Escape to Victory. Football was used as a labour incentive in camps across Poland and Germany, a reprieve given to a select few political prisoners and former professional players. Ron Jones, a British soldier interned at Auschwitz-Birkenau, once said, “Scoring a goal, making a save, or arguing about an offside was the only way you could stop yourself from cracking up.” A snapshot of some relief amidst the misery.
Escape To Victory film poster: a brilliant poster for a brilliant film inspired, allegedly, by a series of games in Kiev during the German occupation of the city. Several members of Dynamo Kiev, the top football team in Ukraine, found work in a bakery, where they formed a football team with other bakery employees. They then began playing in a new league against teams supported by the Ukrainian government and German military, winning every match. All that history and Sly Stallone wants to eradicate the film from his memory—maybe because he dislocated his shoulder and broke his ribs while training with Gordon Banks before filming.
And finally… a Stormtrooper playing football, obviously. Somehow, it’s an officially licensed bit of merch, hand-painted and modelled on the original designs by Andrew Ainsworth. At points, you simply have to applaud George Lucas’ desire to monetise every aspect of his IP from every possible angle. You’d fancy the Rebellion’s chances in a match against these lot; that uniform and those boots look a nightmare to play in, alongside their famously wonky aim.
