Panini football sticker collectors face £1,000 outlay for 48-team World Cup

Soaring prices at the pumps, grocery bills on the rise, and now it seems inflation will be hitting hard the pockets of those football fans for whom no World Cup would be complete without the thrill of opening a packet of Panini stickers.

Since the Italian company’s first sticker collection at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, striving to complete the set has been an obsession for young fans around the globe with swapping of “doubles” and the search for rarities mandatory.

Collecting and completing the official Panini Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022 album cost fans about £870. This year’s World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico will present the biggest challenge yet though and will require a considerable amount of pocket money. An an outlay of around £1,000 may be beyond even the most ardent fan of Harry Kane, Lionel Messi, Vinicius Junior, Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland.

An image of Brazil’s Pele printed on the first World Cup Panini album for Mexico 70. There is a burgeoning market in vintage stickers. Photograph: Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty

With 48 nations heading for the tournament in June and July – the largest edition ever – 980 unique stickers, including 68 “special” ones will be required to fill the 112-page album that goes on sale from Thursday.

Individual packets of seven stickers retail at £1.25 ($1.69) in the United Kingdom, meaning that even with impossibly perfect luck and no duplicates, 140 packets would be required at a cost of £175 . Statistically, however, more than 1,000 packets may be required to acquire every player in the album, meaning an outlay of around a grand.

Some fans view collecting as a form of investment with a burgeoning market in vintage stickers. In 2021, a 1979 Panini sticker of Maradona, then aged 19, sold for £470,000 at auction.

Panini’s biggest ever collection was launched at a special event at Wembley Stadium on Tuesday, with former England players David James, John Barnes and Gary Cahill reliving their sticker-hunting days. “As someone who grew up collecting Panini stickers, swapping with friends in the playground and trying to complete the album every tournament, the album has always marked the real start of a World Cup for me!” the former Chelsea defender Cahill said.