This paper examines a collection of oral history interviews produced within a particular institutional setting: the “Memories of Football” project, carried out by the Museum of Image and Sound (MIS), in the 1980s. We will address the possibilities afforded by working with collections of interviews conducted by third parties, decades apart, and the unexpected aspects arising from the use of narratives recorded at a time when oral history was not yet well stablished and widespread. The presentation also highlights the unexpected conduct of interviewers who imposed their personal research interests and discussions inherent to sports journalism over the public purpose of a project for the preservation of Brazilians’ collective memory of football. When we first accessed the recordings in this collection, our expectations in reusing the materials were to access contents about the life trajectory of players, coaches, and sports columnists. However, a closer examination of the data presented us with other possibilities of usage and analysis, not previously planned by the research, which was initially focused on the interviewees themselves. We were attracted by the record of the thoughts from a character who initially performed backstage at the Museum, since he was one of the project’s managers: José Sebastião Witter (1933–2014), who was a prominent professor at the University of São Paulo (USP). Strictly speaking, Witter emerged before our incursion into the collection’s recordings, when I interviewed him in 2013, a year before his death. The goal of this interview was to better understand the career of one of the introducers of soccer studies into Brazilian universities in the 1980s. The interaction with Witter led us to learn about the existence of a series of recorded accounts, thanks to the initiative of the so-called Oral History Program at MIS, as detailed in a guide to the Museum’s collections.