It’s a grass roots type of collecting. Price guides don’t really play into it and you won’t find a lot of what’s pulled from packs being shipped off to grading companies. What you do find are adults of all ages, kids and both sexes buying them, spending their lunch hours trading them and (gasp!) sticking them into albums like they were intended.
Panini’s soccer stickers are big business–a much larger piece of the company’s pie than what happens with the American subsidiary’s trading cards. It’s a big part of the collecting scene in Europe and with the Euro 2016 tournament underway, there’s a new set of Panini stickers on the market.
Like in the States, guys who grew up in the 90s are sort of rediscovering the hobby and glad to go on camera who discuss their hobby and show off their completed albums (new and old). Some say they stopped spending money on beer and put it into stickers.
It’s an inexpensive way to collect, which is no doubt one reason stickers are huge sellers around the world. Full boxes can be found for under $50 U.S. Complete sets of 680 stickers are being sold for around $100.
The 42, a European website, sent some questions to Panini’s headquarters in Modena, Italy about the company’s history, its founders, its worldwide sales figures and more. A few of the highlights:
- Panini and its 12 subsidiaries will sell stickers, cards and related items to about 110 countries this year with total sales of about $1 billion.
- Panini Group has about 1,000 employees.
- Panini produces about one billion packs a year over the last few seasons.
- The Panini logo is a knight because company founder Giuseppe Panini, who loved riddles and puzzles, invented his own crossword puzzles under the pseudonym ‘The Knight’. Giuseppe Panini died in 1996 at age 71.
- Panini can produce over 25 million packets of stickers a day–over 750 million individual stickers a week.
You can read the entire story with more facts and figures here.
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