Panini pioneers almost came unstuck
A new film charts the football sticker craze and its offshoots, from a tabloid war to Desert Storm, writes Alan Tyers
The knight logo and red typeface are a Proustian madeleine for many who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s
Asimple pleasure in a complicated world this week: stickers. ITV4’S Tuesday night documentary Stuck On You tells a story of collectable cards that begins in a newsagent’s in northern Italy and becomes a playground obsession around the world and, in the UK, a theatre of conflict in the great 1980s tabloid war between Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.
Like the humble sticker, this film has rather unpromising beginnings, as four English chaps in late middle-age with job titles like ‘Sales Director at WH Smith’ explain how they came to be the British retail arm of Panini stickers.
Wait! Come back. It gets good. Giuseppe Panini began selling collectable cards from his shop in Modena, and soon had a name almost as famous as the city’s Ferrari and certainly with more affordable product lines. Then some sticky smarty came up with the idea of adhesive. In 1970, they began doing World Cup albums, and throughout the next decade, albums for football leagues around Europe. In 1978, in association with Shoot magazine, Panini began in the UK. They would sell millions.
Just looking at that yellow letterbox-shaped logo of a jousting knight and the red typeface of Panini functions as a Proustian madeleine for many who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s; immediately transported back to a playground of “Got, got, need” and painstakingly cataloguing, sticking, yearning for a shiny sticker of the Liverpool badge or whatever was that year’s white whale.
Ryan Giggs, no less, pops up to say: “Kids with big bundles of stickers saying, ‘Have you got this one? Have you got that one?
I’ll swap you this,
I’ll swap you that’.
Trying to fill your book was huge. And yeah, I never managed to fill my book.” He says he did make it on to the cover of one, but considers this a poor second prize.
For the company, Smash Hits followed and then a Royal Family album. Sales director Peter Warsop claims that the Royal book benefited from the keen eye of an unlikely proof-reader: “The Queen noticed there was an error with the information about one of the [horse-drawn] coaches,” he says. “Buckingham Palace wrote to request that the error be changed.” By the late ’80s, both The Sun and the Daily Mirror wanted a piece of the action. Panini in Italy decided to go with Murdoch. “Maxwell was apparently livid,” says Warsop. Maxwell then made the Italian parent company an offer they couldn’t refuse. He bought up Panini. The British arm decided to go it alone with a new business, Merlin stickers. That in turn drew the wrath of Bob, who unleashed sticker hell via a deluge of writs, as well as bullying the new firm’s suppliers and wholesalers to ditch the smaller rival.
Stickers, it turned out, could be a dirty business. Houses were remortgaged, careers were on the line and the situation was sticky indeed for the Merlin boys until an improbable saviour arrived in the form of WWF (wrestling, not pandas).
That ludicrous product enjoyed a bit of a moment in the early ’90s in the UK and, via stickers and merchandising, Merlin survived. It even bloomed into a number of new collections, up to and including one on the Desert Storm invasion of Kuwait. Stickers’ world domination was complete.
This is a very enjoyable yarn about a small British business separating from a European parent and making the best of it in a hostile environment.
Perhaps we could swap them for our current politicians?
Stuck On You is on ITV4 tomorrow at 10.15pm.