The fan who keeps Cubillas, Panadero and Muñante t-shirts and will soon open a museum bar

A piece of cardboard the size of a passport photo costs 85,000 euros on eBay. A sheet is worth two soles in Tai Loy. The difference is marked by the face printed on this collection card: the figure of Lionel Messi, the best footballer of these times. Collecting about football is a science that admires the meaning of objects, the story they can tell and the origin of its first curators, that religious sect that runs out of space to store its clothes or runs out of savings for food, but will always have a budget to acquire something else. In Peru, the industrial engineer Miguel Montalvo belongs to this group of guardians of the past.

The first time we spoke, he was surrounded by what other unwary would call garbage: a steel display case with two Merkur balls from the 70s, shelves with dozens of boxes of Panini figurines from all the World Cups and a coat rack that contains at least ten old T-shirts that legendary grandparents belonged to today. But we’ll talk about that later. The plastic file in which we have remained has an entry that is, in turn, bulky paper and cultural heritage of Peruvian football.

“I had to cross the Atlantic Ocean and I’m not kidding, ha ha, he says.”

It is ticket number 28143, high stands, sector 35 of the Olympic tribune, from July 18, 1930. The first owner of this ticket sat in seat 187 and saw how Peru lost to Uruguay at the inauguration of the Centennial Stadium in Montevideo.

The Peruvian collector Miguel Montalvo Robertson takes a photo of him and sends it to me on WhatsApp. I read everything he says with the reverence with which one reads a page of the Old Testament.

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The industrial engineer Miguel Montalvo owes the fire for collecting to his mother. In 2002 she gave him an official Panini album for the Korea Japan World Cup, which we also did not classify. He did not even stop to read the sports diary in which this book of sheets to be filled came. “It was a discovery,” he says. That album served him as a reference, almost a sailor’s compass. “I realized that collecting was like a course in the history of Peru: there you can compare figures, moments of the countries, etc.”. He wondered if there were other albums, and then an unfamiliar door opened for him, like Grandpa’s closet in Narnia. The day his mother passed away, in 2016, Miguel Montalvo already had, in addition to figurines, tickets or World Cup memorabilia, all the Panini in the collection, including the first one, from the World Cup in Mexico 70. Those drawings that seem Huascarán football prints: the Peruvian flag at number 244, Héctor Chumpitaz at 250, Teófilo Cubillas at 256, Luis Rafael Risco at 251.

How wonderful it would have been if his mother could see that the family’s collector son got a few months ago the shirt with which Calidad Risco played the Bombonera game in 1969.

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On your public IG account @hinchadecoleccion He has just shown another of his jewels: an original poster of the 1930 World Cup. “It is believed that today there are only a few posters in existence. The article has an official seal of the Executive Committee ”, Montalvo writes in the caption. This hobby has allowed him to confirm that objects are alive and whoever keeps them that way feeds them. First it is a shoe box, then a wardrobe and then you have to find a place to store everything. The second time we spoke, also via WhatsApp, I was ordering some things with Steffi Roth, his girlfriend, his accomplice and the perfect bridge that has served to meet us. Steffi had her birthday on September 4, but it hasn’t necessarily been a happy September. The departure of his father, the engineer and former Defensor Lima footballer Ernesto Roth, far from taking away his smile, has lit up. The day we met, her impetus was that of a soccer player who goes for the title goal in the 90th minute. That’s what her father used to say to her: “You never have to give up, you always have to fight it to the end and give it all up”. Steffi has a Los Carasucias jersey on while Miguel Montalvo and I chat. I look forward to the day when they both open their museum bar.

What is collecting for you?

Preserve. History, above all. And bring the story to others. Generating memories through period articles is generating an affinity for Peruvian soccer and its heroes. It is the most beautiful thing: with them you live, in some way, the world that they lived.

In your case, was it also unstoppable?

Yes. Once inside you can’t take it anymore. There is no way you can back down. There will always be a way to get something else, even if you don’t have money. With patience and good humor.

How did you get the Peru-Uruguay ticket for the 30th World Cup, on the opening day of the Centennial?

It all started when I was looking for batches of figurines from my Panini album collections and among my contacts I located a collector of tickets from all kinds of matches. The first thing I did was ask him if he had tickets for Peru matches in the World Cup. “I have one out there, if I remember correctly,” he told me. He first told me about Peru’s matches in Spain 82, but the one that I found incredible to see, even in a photo, was that of Peru from 1930. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing! The entrance of the first soccer world cup and Peru was present at the inauguration of the Centenario stadium!

Where was the entrance?

In Spain.

How was the negotiation?

I asked this collector friend to please change or sell it for me, but of course it was quite expensive, so he did me the great favor of keeping it for a very long period of time and for that I am very grateful to him until today. We agreed on a price but I couldn’t afford it at once. Of course, I had to go to Spain to close the deal and now I have her here with me. It is without a doubt one of the most precious treasures in my collection.

What is Steffi’s role in this adventure?

In 2019, after having witnessed the final of the Copa América with Steffi, she told me: “… you have always told me about your collection, but I have never seen it” and as I played, I took out all the objects that are part of my collection, this is how I became ‘re-engaged’, in addition to realizing that just like Steffi, there were many people who appreciated the same thing as me.

Is it true that you plan to set up a museum, a bar?

Yes, we are doing a market study to begin with. Meanwhile, we will soon open a show room at home. Steffi has been super important because she has motivated me to continue collecting, she even suggested that I put more punch into the shirts and she has helped me locate some. What’s more, we have a shirt from when his father, Ernesto Roth, played for Defensor Lima, back in 1965 (the oldest shirt in the collection). Today she and my sister support me with my Instagram account @hinchadecoleccion, a kind of virtual museum, where little by little I will upload photos of the items in my collection. As Don Ernesto always told us: “calm down, everything will come, but with patience.”

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His full name is Luis Rafael Risco Alván (Lima, 1945), It was a size L in the Player model and had the most elegant badge in the history of Peruvian football: Quality. In the Panini album that Miguel Montalvo keeps impeccably in his house in Surco, Risco is figurine 251. It comes out on the left side of Chumpitaz and somehow his place in the field was that, the left lane of Peru, no less than in the La Bombonera’s founding match in 1969, against Argentina. All this the collector knows by heart, who at the end of 2019 went to look for her in the south of Lima. He has that shirt with the number 18 among his treasures.

“This story is almost as crazy as the one about the entrance to the 1930 World Cup, but without the need to leave the country and travel fewer kilometers. In my eagerness to get the oldest shirts of the selection, I also met several collectors who are now my friends and one of them saw me so desperate and insistent to change with him a shirt from his personal collection, one used by Chale in 1969 , that to get rid of me he got me the information of a beautiful shirt: La Bombonera ”, he says.

What was the plan? Going that same day to Cañete, where Risco’s sweater was, convinced by his friend and also a collector Peter Egacila, a fan of Peru like few, very few. “If I have followed the national team everywhere, how could I not go to Cañete for that piece of history, one of the shirts of my dreams?”, Miguel Montalvo recalls now, in the insomnia prior to the national team’s return to the Qualifiers .

A promise has been made: To Qatar, with that blind faith of the fans, he will go with the Risco shirt, curiously the only one of the Bombonera heroes who did not travel to Mexico. Strict and wonderful justice.

The ‘U’ beat River and Racing on 67 and that shirt today sleeps in a glass urn in Surquillo

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