How football stickers took over the world
‘SHINIES’, PLAYGROUND ‘SWAPSIES’ AND A CULT FOLLOWING
For the generations who assembled those meticulous sticker album collections, Panini is a name synonymous with schoolyard swaps, ‘shinies’ and the company’s heraldic knight insignia. It takes a collector of the very obsessive kind to know about the comical glitch on the Celtic pages of the 1978 edition.
That particular album has sat on your correspondent’s shelves for the past 39 years but Greg Lansdowne takes fewer than 10 seconds to point out — with no advance notice we’ll be discussing the edition — that the head of Johannes Edvaldsson, the Icelandic centre back, is superimposed on to the shoulders of Paul Wilson, the club’s forward, on page 52.
It was Panini’s first football album in this country, and was ‘very rushed’, says Lansdowne, a collector turned sticker historian. The Edvaldsson sticker, which employed rudimentary means to disguise that Panini lacked an image of the defender in a Celtic shirt, really does look ridiculous, now that he comes to mention it.
But Panini did not look back. By the time they published their 1979 annual, capturing the Football League and Scottish League squads for the 1978-79 season, they were using 21st-century methods.
The Italian firm struck commercial deals with the Professional Footballers’ Association and Football League, guaranteeing access which enabled them to deliver on what became their article of faith — photographs of every first-team player at every club, in that season’s kit.
The true Panini devotees, like Lansdowne, will tell you that 1979 was the most sublime of all because the much- coveted foil team badges — ‘shinies’ — were enhanced and had a silk- like texture. ‘It seemed to be expensive, so it was back to ordinary foil badges by 1980,’ Lansdowne says.
OThErS
swear blind there will never be a Panini album like 1983, the year in which all players were displayed in full strip. Swansea’s Alan Curtis chose to be photographed in kit and carpet slippers while Bob Latchford didn’t bother with any footwear, which persuaded Panini to revert to head shots in 1984. ‘ But 1983 was a particular favourite of those who like kits,’ Lansdowne says.
These idiosyncrasies did not prevent the Panini albums becoming a commercial phenomenon by the early 1980s. So much so that they triggered a bitter war between robert Maxwell’s Daily
Mirror — who struck a promotional deal to offer readers a free album and stickers — and the Sun, who promptly sought to snatch it.
The Sun’s editor Kelvin McKenzie was so intent that he arrived in person at Panini’s head office in Modena and theatrically threw his wallet across the desk during negotiations. he got his way. Panini was selling nearly 100 million packets a year at the time.
Within five years Maxwell would exact the ultimate revenge. obsessed by Panini, he bought the company, took its £ 15m cash reserves and brought it to its knees within a further four years.
These developments and many more form the dramatic core of a documentary on ITV4 later this month, which draws on Lansdowne’s book about the company, Stuck on You, which was published two years ago.
Both film and book relate how Italian brothers Benito and Giuseppe Panini started out with a news-stand at Modena in northern Italy, branched out into newspaper distribution and stumbled on a sticker craze in 1960 by unexpectedly managing to shift three million packets of two stickers, depicting flowers s and plants.
They moved into to Italian football stickers a year r later, then hit t upon the idea of f an accompanying g album for the e 1970 World Cup. . But it was not t until a relaxation n in European n trading laws that at a full offensive was as launched on the e UK market.
A British com- mpany, FKS, was as trying something similar at the time but most of its albums involved the fiddly process of gluing stickers in and Panini immediately blew them away. Their quality was superior but the firm also tied up many distribution deals to ensure that its albums and stickers were everywhere for Euro
Football 77 — its first title here. It helped that Shoot magazine saw the opportunity. Its own sales soared to 600,000 when it gave away a free album and one 30p packet of six stickers of the 1977 album. Panini always published in January, giving it the five months it felt it needed after the clubs’ pre- season photoshoots to assemble squads, in correct strip, with accompanying text. There was an obsession with accuracy.
The documentary charts Panini’s British spin-offs, including Smash
Hits sticker albums in the 1980s and a royal Family album. But football was the staple, with newspapers’ newspape sometimes hapless