戻る

The other day I was doing another one of my regular second hand t-shirt scouting walks. There's a thrift store chain in my city that I frequent because it helps various trusted charities and sometimes has some nice gems of t-shirts and other stuff to dig out. This time I found this t-shirt:

At first I thought it was a rugby t-shirt for some reason (a good chunk of second hand clothes imports in Kaliningrad come from Ireland, Italy is somewhat good at rugby, and it does look rugby-ish to a degree). I noticed the Funny Sex Number on the shirt but I dismissed it as just being the player's number.

When I got home, I decided to google the player's last name to learn more about him, and I was a bit surprised to see so few results. All I got was some little-known fashion brand; the Images section mostly had pics of the clothes by the brand, but there were a few photos of people in a familiar blue t-shirt. All of them lead to a Flickr page of a man named Stefano Di Ficchiano.

It's a curious feeling knowing that my particular t-shirt is probably on one of these pictures! Now that I had the first name, I did some more digging and found two YouTube channels associated with the man: soccerfan2006 and discofussball. My German knowledge, while not being at an absolute zero level, is sadly not nearly enough to understand what's being said in these videos, but from what I could understand, Stefano is an Italian man residing in Germany, and around the time the 2006 FIFA World Cup was taking place in Germany he had a meme hobby project titled "Discofussball" centered around his love for music, football, drinking and women. The videos feature the same catchy song that begins with "Stefano, ah, yeah, Stefano, ah" followed by lyrics in German. The Flickr photos are most likely from some kind of Discofussball-themed party.

Other things that elaborate on the Stefano Di Ficchiano lore that I found were: some German article that seems devoid of any meaning (with the images seemingly gone forever) and two now-arhived websites: discofussball.com and stefanodificchiano.de. The first one is a project page for Discofussball that appears to be well-preserved to a degree.

The second one is... also a project page for Discofussball, but this time it's a Flash page. Now, you can't play Flash in browsers through normal means these days, but specially for you, dear readers, I went ahead and launched the thing on my PC. Here's what it looks like (the football bounces from left to right, from one woman's head to the another):

The autoplay song on this page has been recorded off this Flash masterpiece.

This page probably doesn't carry any special meaning, it was just a wacky little thing I found interesting. However, I think you should always try to dig up some history for second hand things you buy - you never know what you may find! It's just so amazing that a t-shirt from a 2006 German meme hobby project that I thought to be just some rugby merch ended up in my hands 17 years later in an isolated part of Europe. And I got it from a thrift store, meaning that some local folks donated it to the store, which implies that someone here has already owned it before, probably not knowing the entire story. Perhaps I should do the same for all of my second hand t-shirts.