Welcome to The Vault, a new series from MUNDIAL where we celebrate the artefacts, objects, iconic global products, and little bits of tat that make football history fizz with wonder. It could be anything from Predators to Kings, an exceptionally rare Inter Milan kit from the 80s or a football stamp from Guinea-Bissau. Balls, film posters, statues, fan memorabilia, bootleg shirts—anything that we think deserves to be cherished.
Each week, we’ll interview someone connected to an object that we believe deserves to go into The Vault: forever enshrined and immortalised in an archive of joy.
There is nobody better to kick this off than A Store Like 94, the Tour de Tat King who scours the world for the best in football fashion, memorabilia, art, and everything in between. Josh has a genuinely remarkable story about a very special object…
“I inherited this from a friend who got it when his grandfather passed away. It's easily one of the rarest things in my collection. It’s a Mexico ‘86 World Cup cap with an inbuilt radio, which is just so cool. His granddad got it when he happened to be visiting Mexico in 1986; despite not actually being there for the World Cup at the time, he was just there when the tournament was going on and he saw it, and thought, “Wow, look at that, what a great cap”. His grandad ended up amassing a huge hat collection, and when he sadly passed away a few years ago, my friend called me up because he knew I love football and collecting things and asked if I’d be interested in it. Having it in my collection obviously feels very special because of that connection.
“Just looking at it, it is beautiful: tournament logo on the front, snapback cap. But the really mad thing about it was that when I put it on, I realised that antennae were sticking out of it. There are controls on the side, and then it has these headphones that you pull out of the peak and put in your ear. I hadn’t seen anything like it before.
“The first time I put the hat on, I decided that of course I am going to try and turn the radio on.