Playing and collecting athletes

A few days ago, walking towards my house, I witnessed a love scene between a father and his little daughter. They were both crouched and pulling some round figures towards the bottom of a step in a business that at the time was a bakery, In that place there were several other figurines, this time rectangular, resting between the floor and the wall of the step, the idea was to hit them with the round ones and throw them.

They were both laughing and having a great time.

Next, a large plastic bag containing various objects and clothes that was leaning against the wall caught my attention again. When I looked at the floor, I saw the unmistakable symbol of the cartoneros, an iron bent at the tip forming a right angle and a wooden handle. inserted at its other end. The father and daughter were humble people who rummaged through large garbage containers looking for objects to sell, in some cases discarded food.

But evidently, that unfortunate fate did not prevent them both from playing and having fun without anything or anyone distracting them in that moment of infinite joy.

The object of fun was the figurines and that reminded me of @soylegionario's publication that I later chose for our magazine as the best of the week.

For many years, the figurines have been a source of fun and elusiveness for children, also for those not so children, and this last statement comes from remembering my father's enthusiasm for buying me the packages and helping me open them and discovering how lucky we had been. in getting some that my album didn't have yet. I even remember one occasion when he came home with a whole box, containing 100 packages of those figurines to try to fill the album and win the leather ball that the Starosta company had put as a prize for all those who completed it. Of course, I remember his joy when he opened one of the packages that contained one of the "difficult" ones and his disappointment when he finished all of them and realized that of the three that were missing, we only got one. I never told him anything, but it is certain that if I saved the money invested in the purchase of that box as savings, in a couple of months we would have been able to buy the ball.

Since I am curious and perhaps a little obsessed with history and its stories, I went to look for something more about these figurines.

Of course, I knew that the oldest or, rather, the most deeply rooted custom of collections of printed images of athletes comes from the United States and its extraordinary passion for the national sport: baseball. To my astonishment, I learned that the first figures, which in the northern country are called "cards", were printed in 1868 by the firm of sports teams specialized in baseball, Peck & Snyder. They were a kind of business cards or cards. presentation with the photograph of the teams of that time, was a promotion for the business, quite far from the concept of collectible figures that later burst into the world of children.

After that first approach, other companies emerged that printed cards until 1887, when Goodwin & Co. ordered 129 cards to be printed. This firm is considered the first manufacturer of collectible baseball cards.

Here in my country, the sport par excellence is football and of course, the first images printed to collect them were of players and teams of that sport. Even with the limited information available, I was able to confirm that the first collectible figurines emerged in the 1910s, something surprising since this sport only began to be organized and spread towards the end of the 19th century when the first associations in Denmark and Holland, today the Netherlands. That on the other side of the world there were images of football just a couple of decades later is truly surprising, this probably explains and puts into context why in these latitudes this sport is carried in the blood.

For reasons of age, I can only attest to my first experiences with collectible figurines in the 1960s and at that time the albums included some that all of us children knew as "difficult", with a clear commercial spirit, the manufacturers expressly They printed a small quantity of a few so that the collections would not be completed quickly and thus force parents to buy more and more packages. In my case, the experience with the difficult ones was horrible, frustrating, and financially painful. I was never able to complete an album while I was a child.

Something very different happened with the current largest manufacturer of sports figurines in the world, the famous Panini who never had collections that included difficult figurines, bravo to the Panini family who started their collectibles business in 1961 and to date are the largest manufacturers and distributors of collectibles that began with soccer and have spread to other sports, they also create albums for the main soccer leagues in the world and of course for international events such as the Copa América, the Euro Cup, and the World Cup.

I could continue talking about this nice custom, how we played with the figurines, and the good variety of games we invented with them, but this post would go on for too long.

It is enough to know that they are not only collected, but they also collaborate in children's games and fun, they even make them dream of owning, for example, Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.