As the 2026 World Cup looms, many fans of the beautiful game are preparing to shell out eye-watering sums to watch their national team play.
“Around a thousand in total,” Ryan Hannon, 29, told Business Insider. “But it’s worth it!”
Hannon is not referring to much-coveted stadium tickets. This is the amount he has spent on Panini stickers since he started collecting in 2018.
“For me, it’s the nostalgia. It’s a proper childhood core memory that brings me back,” Hannon said.
You might remember Panini stickers from your childhood. The premise is simple: you buy a physical booklet with blank spaces for each player and team badge, plus bonus stickers for mascots, host stadiums, and sponsors. Then you trade your duplicates with other collectors until the book is full.
Hannon is one of millions of so-called “mature collectors” who are obsessed with the stickers. Encouraged by his 8-year-old son, he trades on a Facebook group with more than 13,000 members. This is the wild west, where people post cribbed handwritten notes or Excel sheets listing teams and player numbers, and increasingly existential musings on the nature of the swap market.
The Panini album has been out since 1970
Christian Fialho, a 30-year-old customer success manager from Kent, is also a keen member of this online community.
“It’s about those buzz moments before you open your pack,” he told Business Insider. “Not knowing who you’re going to get, but hoping it’s the one that you need! Such a simple, yet timeless concept.”
This year, diehard completists face a particular logistical and financial challenge.
The 2026 tournament is the biggest since Panini — an Italian collectibles and comics brand — launched its World Cup books in 1970. With 48 competing teams, the 112-page, 980-sticker album features competitors like Curaçao, Cape Verde, and Uzbekistan for the first time.
Some collectors are not pleased with the scale. “Stickers are lower quality this year,” Paddy Te, a 37-year-old collector, said. “Colors don’t even match, lighting on players is awful, prices are higher, and there is more to collect than ever before.”
Nonetheless, he has around 800 stickers collected and is nearly done. He attributes the obsession to his ADHD — “My brain needs to be doing something pretty much all the time.”
Each pack costs $2
Individual packets of seven stickers cost $2 in the US and £1.25 in the UK, and with zero duplicates, buying 140 packets would cost $280. But the contents are randomized, and some have estimated the cost of completing the album solo to be over $1300.
That’s where swapping comes in. Many people do it via Facebook groups, but Tomás Louro — a 37-year-old London-based designer — found it a bit clumsy. He’s built Swap Club as an alternative, a free website where collectors can trade by post.
“It’s all free, no selling, no ads. The whole point is just so you can finish your album,” he said. “Ads defeat the whole purpose of this.”
The site now has a few hundred users, some of whom are close to finishing their albums entirely through postal swaps with strangers.
Read more of our World Cup coverage.
Fialho says trading is a way to “meet other collectors, help each other out, and importantly, keep the costs down.” But some spending is inevitable: he has spent around $270 on stickers this year and is 70% complete.
The Kent collector is not naive about the market. “Whenever there’s profit to be made, there are certain individuals you should watch out for. There’s serious money exchanging hands in the sports card market these days.”
Messi is hard to find
Retro stickers can command extraordinary prices: in 2021, a 1979 Panini sticker of a teenage Maradona sold $637,000 at auction. Rarer inserts from this year’s album — gold, silver, and bronze variants of star players — likewise generate serious interest. “I have seen gold Ronaldos go for $535 online,” says Louro. Hannon’s family got a piece of the action too, selling a Gold Salah sticker for $74.
“If you do it alone, and you’re not a kid swapping on the playground, you just have to buy and buy and buy,” Louro said. “And it’s so expensive.”
How much has he spent himself? “My wife asked me that the other day,” he laughs. He doesn’t have a precise answer, but with around 900 stickers, he’s 92% complete. He’s also keeping his Portuguese squad duplicates, for sentimental reasons.
Whether it’s nostalgia or the thrill of the chase, something keeps these adults buying, swapping, and waiting by the mailbox.
“It’s one of those things,” the designer says. “It’s the World Cup. It’s special. You talk about it, you know the players, you know the teams. It’s about enjoying the moment — not just trying to get it done.”
Louro is still missing Messi.
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