ThreeMatchBan
Andy Gray spent years telling Sky Sports viewers, at considerable volume, that the Premier League was the only division worth watching. It was never true. Football has always been played brilliantly elsewhere, and some of the finest players the game has produced never kicked a ball in the English league at all.
This football history quiz is for them. Thirty-three stars from past and present, each pictured on a classic album sticker with the name stripped away, are waiting below. The names will be familiar. The faces, younger, thinner, hairier or caught in an unflattering studio flash, may not be.
The players England never saw
For long stretches of the twentieth century, foreign stars simply did not come to England. Work-permit rules, maximum-wage restrictions in earlier decades and the plain fact that Italian and Spanish clubs paid far more kept the best players on the continent or in South America. English supporters saw them once every four years at a World Cup, on grainy television, and then they vanished back into a weekly league nobody here could watch.
That distance made them mythical. A Brazilian playmaker or a Dutch centre-forward existed mainly as a highlight package, a magazine poster and, crucially, a sticker. For a lot of children growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the first close look at a world superstar was a two-inch portrait peeled off a backing sheet in the school playground.
The home nations did not help themselves either. Scotland missed every major tournament after 1998 for more than two decades, and England failed to reach Euro 2008. Looking abroad was the only way to see the very best for long spells.
How stickers became a cult
The modern football sticker grew out of the Italian city of Modena, where the Panini brothers produced their first football album for the 1961–62 Serie A season. The idea was simple: buy a packet, open it, stick the players in the right square and swap the duplicates. The first World Cup album followed for Mexico 1970, and the format barely changed for decades.
What changed was the obsession. Albums became a playground currency, with "got, got, need" muttered over piles of swaps and shiny badge stickers worth five ordinary players on the open market. Completing a World Cup album meant knowing the squads of countries most children could not find on a map. Sticker collectors could name the reserve goalkeeper of a nation that had qualified for the first time, decades before the internet made that sort of knowledge cheap.
Many adults still remember the one player they never found. A fond look back at football stickers covers that particular agony well.
The portraits themselves are half the fun now. Studio lighting was harsh, retouching was rough and haircuts were left entirely to the player's conscience. A face you know from a thousand replays can look like a stranger in sticker form, which is exactly what makes this set hard.
How to play
Under every sticker there is an answer box. Type the player's full name and the box turns green when it matches, while the score counter at the top adds a point. No sign-up, no deadline and no penalty for guessing.
Use the name the player was best known by. Where a star is known by first name and surname, type both.
When the world stars are done, the Copa America sticker quiz heads to South America, the Premier League imports quiz covers the overseas players who did make the move, and every other album challenge sits under the football sticker quiz heading.
Stickers from the 1970s are always the cruellest kind, from an age when a studio portrait in a tight polo-neck passed for glamour.