Football’s memory keeper: the man with more than 5,000 shirts

Marcelo Ordás’s obsession started after he fainted at a World Cup and now his Madrid museum is a monument to game’s history

The best thing Marcelo Ordás ever did was pass out. The way he tells it, and he is some storyteller, for a moment he thought it was The End; instead, it was the start. “The genesis,” he calls it. That day in Turin, an Argentinian student who would briefly embark on a career as a diplomat was handed what he describes as his life’s mission to become a kind of footballing archaeologist, travelling the world to recover its most treasured relics; the “armour” with which its idols fought. Thirty-three years later, the result is the most significant collection of football shirts on earth, at last displayed in a Madrid museum.

He met everyone: Pelé, Maradona, Steve Hodge but in the beginning there was Claudio Caniggia. Ordás was 17 and was at the 1990 World Cup second-round clash between international football’s greatest rivals, a tale told of a suffering steadily building to the moment that changed his life: from Brazil tearing Argentina apart and their fans taunting him from the other side of the fence – “our pain was their entertainment” – to the realisation he could watch no more, sitting head in hands “waiting for them to score so we could all go home”. And the noise that made him look again.