The war of the European Championship stickers: UEFA makes a mistake, Panini doesn’t
UEFA gave the license to the American Topps, who however included Wales who did not qualify. The Telegraph reports on "the commercial battle"
ROME – Sacrilegio: the official sticker albums of the 2024 European Championships are wrong. Some important England players such as Saka, John Stones and Phil Foden are missing due to contractual issues. On the other hand, there is Wales, who were eliminated in the qualifiers, and some marginal players such as Ebereche Eze and Callum Wilson. The album with the UEFA license is produced by Topps, which was previously famous above all for baseball cards. Then UEFA entered the market – a little romantic but very corporate – of football stickers. And a sort of “war” broke out. With the Panini , and with whom else?
The Telegraph tells it, because in England there is a culture of stickers that is very reminiscent of the Italian one. And why from tomorrow Marks & Spencer’s (England’s poshest supermarket chain) will be giving away packs of limited edition Panini European Championship stickers to anyone who spends more than £20. The Telegraph underlines that incredibly, the charm of stickers endures even in the digital age.
Until recently Panini dominated the market. Then UEFA in 2022, after a collaboration lasting 46 years, said enough and made an agreement for the 2024 European Championships with Topps. However, Panini can still produce its own albums for Euro 2024, even if without the imprimatur of UEFA. And then there are the Home Nation packs, the ones distributed through M&S, which contain 50 limited edition stickers and cover England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. According to Jamie Redknapp – who was once one of the most sought-after trading cards of the 1990s – the new M&S initiative “is beautiful. I just think it’s a good thing, becauseanything that keeps your kids away from screens for a minute is a good thing. Football cards might seem a little retro, but if you think about it, there are many positive aspects, including the entrepreneurial skills of exchanging cards on the playground.”
The Telegraph also reconstructs the history of Panini, starting “with the Panini brothers – Benito and Giuseppe – in their hometown of Modena. The brothers realized they were on to something when their very first releases – which depicted flowers and plants and they had to be glued with a separate tube of glue – they sold three million stickers in 1960. They moved into football a year later and entered the British market in the late 1970sIn the early 1980s, The Sun and Daily Mirror fought a desperate battle for distribution rightsWhile the Sun might have won the battle,the Mirror won the war when its infamous owner Robert Maxwell stepped in and bought Panini in 1988. for just under 100 million pounds”.
“The company suffered under the ownership of Maxwell – the fraudster who is now perhaps best known as the father of Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell – as he used their financial reserves to prop up other parts of his business empire. He employed prisoners – an ironic twist given his posthumous exposure as a fraudster – to put the stickers in the packages.”
“In the confusion surrounding Maxwell’s death at sea in 1991, Panini lost the rights to the new Premier League, instead allowing Merlin – a company formed by four disgruntled former Panini employees – to step in. Panini managed to recover that market only in the 2019-20 season”.