GOT: AN ICONIC brand and essential ritual ahead of every major football tournament.
Got: A once-in-a-century pandemic forcing the postponement of the next major football tournament.
Need: A Plan B.
Among the innumerable small emblems of normality missing from our year will be the swapping of Panini stickers to try and fill a Euro 2020 album, although the company have salvaged something from the turmoil.
While it’s not the full tournament album, but they have changed gear to bring out a ‘Preview Album collection’, which features squad stickers of the 20 sides already confirmed for the Euros. Ireland and the rest in the antechamber of the play-offs get a mention, although don’t get the full sticker treatment. The regular album is due to appear next year.
The planning for the Euro 2020 album was at an advanced stage when everything ground to a halt in March, so while the timing wasn’t exactly ideal, it wasn’t disastrous, either.
“We’ve got a fantastic team in Italy, who are producing a number of different collections for all markets”, says Chris Clover, Panini’s Head of Sports Marketing.
“We are well-resourced to cope with these kinds of things and there’s a lot of experience and expertise [at Head Office] in Modena where the collection has been designed, so once the news broke the tournament was postponed, the machine swung into operation.
“Had it been much later, and we had finalised everything and printed everything, it would have been a very different story, but we hadn’t gone into production on the final piece. We were able to repurpose content and come up with a new album with a new cover and new packaging, and we were able to do it in good time.”
The Panini story began in 1961, when brothers and newsagents Benito and Giuseppe Panini bought a collection of stickers off a company in Milan and sold them in packets of two at 10 lire apiece.
Those stickers featured flowers, but the brothers shifted a remarkable three million packets. They then moved into football, and struck an agreement with Fifa ahead of the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.
They moved into the UK football market in 1978, blowing away the competition with their embrace of technology and the quality of the product. Originally stickers were made of cardboard and had to be manually glued to the book, but Panini used self-adhesive stickers were used from 1971.
They also developed what became known as “fifimatic” technology, which allowed stickers to be mixed and packaged automatically and randomly. This left pretenders trailing in their wake: the Daily Mirror in England, for example, brought out an ersatz alternative in the “Stick with Soccer” album and employed prison inmates to fill packets with stickers.
The efficient, random sorting of packets remains a cornerstone of Panini’s success, with a mathematics professor using probability to calculate the cost of filling the 2018 World Cup album at around €883.
Revenue climbs in the even-numbered years that bring World Cups and European Championships: in 2018, off the back of the World Cup in Russia, the company posted a turnover of €1 billion having sold stickers in 120 countries.
Panini also recently secured the official rights to the Premier League, snatching them back from Merlin, which was established by a couple of former Panini employees.
It has been adapted to keep pace with the times – 2010 saw the launch of a virtual sticker album on the Fifa website – but Clover says the appetite for the physical sticker book remains high and unaffected by the downward trends seen in magazines and newspapers over the last decade.
The pre-Christmas publication date of the Premier League album means next season’s albums have yet to be affected and while sales have been hit by the lockdown and the disappearance of football from television, but preparations are nonetheless underway for next season’s edition.
“When the season begins won’t necessarily dictate when the collection lands, we know when it’s going to launch”, says Clover. “It’s more a case of us knowing all of the assets we need to create the product: collecting photos, facts, and figures and making sure the right players are included is the real trick to it.”
Tournament sticker albums go to print before final squads are announced, and Clover says Panini seek as much advice from federations as they can when deciding who to include, along with heeding the views of their own, internal experts. He says Panini have been known to gain insight into World Cup squad selections before the media or supporters, although declines to give any examples.
They did correctly predict that Francesco Totti would be left out of the Italy squad for the 2010 World Cup, but there have also been some notable omissions on their own part.
Toto Schillaci and Roger Milla were omitted from the 1990 World Cup album, while Emmanuel Petit scored in the 1998 World Cup final having not appeared in that edition of the Panini album. Michael Owen was also left out in ’98, along with Alan Shearer, Edgar Davids and Javier Zanetti.
England fans will wish their prediction that Ronaldinho wouldn’t make Brazil’s 2002 World Cup was true, while Thomas Muller missed out in 2010 before winning that tournament’s Golden Boot.
Exclusions aside, there has been one notorious inclusion.
The 2002 World Cup edition featured one Roy Keane, but we can hardly hold that against them.
