Bored at home in the days of the pandemic, Josan Albiac opened a chest and found a treasure: from among the hodgepodge of useless objects emerged an album of Italian football stickers, season 92-93. Calcium !
The discovery opened two spigots.
He was inspired by Aylan's Dream (Editorial Circulo Rojo), the first step in his literary trilogy. And he invited him to design an album of stickers with the members of Futsal Binéfar, the futsal club that he and two other colleagues had founded years ago.
The idea was ingenious: it consisted of taking pictures of all the kids in the club, and the technicians, and the monitors, and the directors, and putting their faces on cards, and adding their names, and selling the cards and albums at Valentia, a cafeteria-bakery in Binéfar.
A Panini a la casera.
–What happens is that, among the 180 kids in the club (from five-year-olds to 17-year-olds), there were those who refused to give up the image of their child, for privacy reasons –Josan Albiac tells me, who He is a soccer entrepreneur and writer, and a renowned humorist, imitator of fanfare and sports figures.
Mistake: today, those suspicious parents hit their heads against the wall.
It turns out that the card festival has become an event of the first magnitude among the children of Binéfar, who spend time in the courtyard (there are three schools in the town, with 10,000 inhabitants) exchanging the cards of their fellow soccer players, neighbors of desk, just like we did with Chewbacca and Luke Skywalker back in the days of Star Wars.
–We sold 500 envelopes in an hour! –voices Josan Albiac.
And now, in the courtyards of Binéfar, there is no talk of anything other than the sticker album: there are 10,000 little faces circulating around the town, one step away from being glued to a page.
–And suddenly a few parents and a few kids who had turned their backs on us have repented and have come to see me and ask me what they can do to get into the album. So I had to use my imagination –Albiac tells me.
–¿...?
–To the bottom of the album we have added three sheets of recent signings, and thus we have recovered fifteen kids who had been left behind.
And you see it.
There will be Binefarenses who end up abandoning their album out there. And perhaps years later, perhaps in the tedium of a pandemic, one of them will open a chest and rediscover himself, his face glued to a collectible, free of wrinkles and long hair, just as we were when we were stars.
And maybe the lucky one becomes a writer.
