As if they had guessed it: the Panini company once again gave everything they had on their last assignment. For the European Football Championship, which should actually have taken place in 2020, the first sticker collection album was already available during the qualification (“Road to Uefa Euro 2020”), the next collection was released in spring 2020 and became even faster after the tournament was postponed due to the pandemic stamped “Preview”. And then, a year later, it was time for the actual booklet – the “Uefa Euro 2020 Tournament Edition”.
Until further notice, it will be the last EM sticker album by the traditional manufacturer Panini from Modena. As the US company Topps announced on Wednesday, it has secured the rights to all stickers and trading cards for the 2024 and 2028 European Championships, has engaged the celebrity coach José Mourinho as an ambassador for this project and has significantly expanded its portfolio with this coup: The collections for the Bundesliga and the Champions League have also come from Topps for a number of years. Panini, on the other hand, reconquered the Premier League in 2019, also publishes the collections for the Italian, Spanish and French leagues year after year and continues to hold what is probably the most important right on the sticker market: that for the World Cup.
Panini still holds the rights for the World Cup (here the German national team in the 1974 issue).
(Foto: Miriam Schmidt/picture alliance / dpa)
The fact that the pictures are no longer coming from northern Italy for the EM in Germany in 2024 should cause melancholy among passionate fans. Since there have been European Championship finals with at least eight teams, i.e. since 1980, Panini has always been responsible for producing the right pictures. With the first edition, there was possibly no real trust in the German collectors at the time, the EM collection was simply packed into a combined album with the Bundesliga. Football fans, who are now around 50, should remember how, with pounding hearts, they tore open the packet they had bought in a stationery shop for 20 pfennigs – and then either looked forward to the artistically designed silver-blue coat of arms of Greece or to a photo of the Coach bench Bayer Uerdingens annoyed. This strange mixed form only existed in Germany, while in Italy, but also in Austria, France and Switzerland (whose national teams didn’t even qualify for the finals in Italy) sticker collections appeared especially for the tournament.
680 stickers for a full album – that’s pocket money
Since then, European Championships without Panini stickers have been unthinkable, and with the number of participating nations, the number of pictures to be purchased has also increased over the years. When 24 teams started in France for the first time in 2016 and the most important players were not just portraits but also in action, you suddenly needed 680 different stickers for a full album. That went into (pocket) money.
The Panini brand is a bit like the Tempo or Uhu brands – it has become the generic name for adhesive albums as such. Part of the melancholy that now seems to be spreading among passionate collectors of football pictures is due to this cult status. In addition, the competing company is not particularly popular in the community: until a few years ago, the Bundesliga collections were designed rather carelessly, some of the booklets contained less than 300 stickers and were only sold through a discount supermarket in southern Germany. Only since the 2020/21 season has Topps been working harder on the German stickers. The lavish Champions League collections by the Americans are much more popular.
Wayne Gretzky from the 1979-80 NHL season costs $1500
The core competence of the company, which was founded in 1938, has been in the trading card market (i.e. without an adhesive backing) for many years, which has a long tradition in the USA in particular. Topps still holds the rights to Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Hockey League (NHL) there today. For many Americans, these trading cards have long been an investment, for a Topps card from ice hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky from his first NHL season in 1979/80 around 1500 dollars are called on Ebay.
The most expensive contemporary European football picture, albeit with an adhesive surface and not to be put in a collection folder, is that of Erling Haaland in his only 2019/20 season in the Austrian Bundesliga in the Red Bull Salzburg jersey. You should pay at least 200 euros for it, some sellers even ask for 700 euros and more. Incidentally, this little picture was published by Panini. The Topps copy from the Champions League season at that time is meanwhile available for a bargain price of around 50 euros.
