I was having a conversation with a friend  over the weekend, and the infamous Eurosport catalogue got brought up. If you are, or were, anything like me, the arrival of this famed catalogue held some sort of magical power.

This might be hard for some of you cats to imagine, but for a long time (even after the Internet was holding things down), Europsort was the only source of the latest and greatest gear for soccer geeks like me. Finding the Eurosport catalogue in the mailbox was like finding a treasure chest of everything that I wanted to cop. Boots, jerseys, training gear, bags, accessories…this was my Willy Wonka Factory and I wanted all of it.

The thing is, the arrival of the Eurosport Catalogue represented one of those simple things in life. A collection of everything that a kid could want and dream of, interspersed with photos of the players that they idolized. Hard to imagine the mailman dropping off anything more exciting (hold off on the jokes here). You always knew the catalogue would arrive at some point, you just never knew when. So its arrival always made my day and kept me busy marking off item after item that I was trying to figure out a way to get my hands on.

Things may have changed a bit since these days. Everything you want is a click away, and that is an amazing thing. As much as I embrace the Internet, I’ll always have an affinity for printed material. Be that magazines, books or catalogues…and even more so when it is filled with all the latest soccer equipment I could possibly imagine. I have no idea if there is a future for physical catalogues, but every once in awhile it’s good to look back and remember.