My love of football stickers

Long before the dawn of the internet and the vast chasm of information it brought with it, information on players and teams wasn’t always that easy to come by for a stat hungry football nerd.

There was no instantly accessible source of information like Wikipedia for that hit of loose knowledge on a player or team and there was no Google for a quick refresher of what their accompanying face looks like.

My source of information was something far simpler, but a lot more addictive and enjoyably so. It was football stickers.

My book case is stuffed full of old sticker albums that periodically see the light of day and I happily trawl through old memories and players and occasionally rediscover someone or learn something about them which has been confined to the darkest recess of my mind.

Whenever I do this though, my search is usually quite specific as for me there are only four makers of sticker or card albums that are worth taking notice of and four particular albums.

Orbis

For me Orbis is the original and the ultimate. More than just a collection of pages with spaces for stickers and an obligatory list of the clubs honours, The Orbis Football Collection from 1990/91 was and still remains the definitive.

Available in weekly instalments, with the sticker collection coming first, as well as a mine of other information, Orbis was certainly unconventional in its presentation, not in the least the way the stickers were organised, as they were oddly sorted by a players position.

The fact that the sticker book was presented in a ring-binder was also unusual, as this was typically the preserve of card collections. However these quirks of difference only heightened my fascination with it, as I was able to discover by position a little snippet of information about each player and see them in action for their club in wonderfully captured action shots.

Curiously the collection didn’t begin and end with stickers, but went on to provide a treasure chest of information, including a club directory of every team in England and the top division of Scotland, biographies of superstars past and present, recollections of glory goals and magic matches and flashback features on historical points of interest.

The comparatively minuscule record transfer fees for each team detailed in the club directory are a fascinating retrospective reminder of just how much the game has changed in the 20 years since the collections publication.

For a statistically hungry kid with an unhealthy appetite for the game, this was a gold mine of information, which I spent hours pouring over, with my Grandad filling in the details where necessary. This was more than a playground pastime; this was an encyclopaedia with football stickers included.

Pro-Set

The trouble with card collections was that they were bulky and cumbersome and required gigantic folders to store them in.

They wouldn’t fit in your school trousers very easily and as a consequence stickers naturally became the hobby of choice, although there was one singular challenge to this and that was the Pro-Set series produced for the 1990/91 season.

In complete ignorance of the popular culture of focusing on the top flight, which would come to dominate future football collections, Pro-Set took the punk attitude of covering all four divisions. This was denoted by the colour of the strip bearing the players name down the left-hand side of the image on cards front, which was in descending order, red, blue, yellow, mucky green.

As the cards progressed down the divisions the amount of cards allocated decreased and only focused on the perceived key players from a select few teams. Included as players of note from the lower leagues were veteran cult hero Luther Blissett during a brief spell with Bournemouth and future Premier League star Dion Dublin playing for Cambridge.

Obviously lacking the space of a sticker album to include a player’s biography, Pro-Set included a brief history on the reverse of the card, which was presented in an effortlessly smart style, just as the front of the card was.

The wonderfully worded descriptions painted more of a picture than any statistics could, such as this one of Paul McGrath which helped elevate the series far above its imitators.

Panini

When it comes to the model that future sticker books would copy, Panini set the standard and it didn’t get much better for me than their Italia ’90 World Cup album.

Understandably completely ignorant of foreign stars at a young age, Panini opened up another world of football, in which players existed outside of my blinkered knowledge of the Barclays Division One.

Even before the World Cup began I was indiscriminately aware of players whose sticker I’d collected, who they played for and how each individual country had qualified for the tournament.

Devoid of the gloss that dominated future collections, Panini’s album was fantastically sparse in its presentation, simply devoting it’s pages to essential information and wonderfully captured images of players lining up for the anthems before a game.

It was an obvious cost saving measure that separated Panini albums from most though, as they seemingly printed only one copy of the album for each country they were distributed to and simply wrote the name of each participating team in their own language and added a list of how it is said in a few other popular European languages. Charming. Belgique-Belgie remains a favourite.

If for nothing else the album will always be remembered for introducing me to the amazing moustache and hair combo of Uruguay’s Eduardo Pereira.

Merlin

By the time Merlin had released their Premier League sticker collection in 1994, everyone in the playground had latched onto the popularity of the sport and it was seemingly no longer a hobby for the fascinated few.

Now everyone wanted to know what Roy Wegerle looked like, or needed the Norwich City team photo to complete their collection.

The fervour though surrounding the album was justified as Merlin had managed to obtain fantastically uniform shots of players from every team and had also included little extra treats for the collectors, who blindly ignored the fact that they were money making tools to pad out the album.

Replicas of each clubs matchday programme was a fascinating peak into the presentation of other clubs for a kid who had yet to feel the joy of an away day and the joy of seeing ‘shiny’ mock-ups of every teams kit remains a treasured one.

The central feature shamelessly promoting Sky Sports was lost on me at the time, but it clearly represented the beginning of the commercialisation of the game.

The inclusions of John Salako in a pair of shorts that appear to be little more than big pants and Richard ‘Do Me A Favour Love’ Keys in a bright yellow jacket, which he presumably wore for a bet, are odd additions in retrospect to a feature that was trying to promote a professional brand.

However glossy and slickly produced it was, it still maintained the basics of information that kept me repeatedly trawling through whenever an unfamiliar players name was mentioned on Match Of The Day.

Tags: Dion Dublin, Merlin, Orbis, Panini, Premier League, Pro-Set, World Cup

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