The World Cup and football in general is a magnet for collecting and the number one item to collect was the trading card or more recently the sticker.
Today the Panini album is the top of the collecting tree with millions of people around the world vying to complete the sticker book. It’s not that easy when you need to collect 640 stickers and not cheap at 50p a pack containing only five stickers. You can’t collect every player in the World Cup anyway has Panini and others print their stickers months ahead of the official naming of the squads leading to players who are going to Brazil missing.
Mathematicians at the University of Geneva used probability theory to calculate that collectors have to buy 899 packets (costing £449.50) to get every sticker, taking into account getting duplicates and excluding the possibility of swapping with other collectors.
Today collecting is a lot easier than when I was a child. Then you had to rely on the playground and your mates to swap spares but now you have social media to help in the quest for a full set. There are more and more adults taking an interest in collecting as seen in the press and on TV recently. With so many short cuts to fill an album someone I read fill his for under a £100 to collect all 664, using social media. Surely, it defeats the whole idea of the chase taking a shortcut like that. It gets so competitive in some households at I read on the internet of a mum who bought a pack for her son and found a rare sticker only for her husband to steal it.
It was not stickers in my day but trading cards and coins and it was mainly the preserve of young boys who liked football. There were a number of ways of collecting one of my favourites was Typhoo Tea cards as we drunk a lot of tea in our house so a better chance of filling the album. You could also collect with the aid of some chewing gum brands or in boxes of sweet cigarettes all had their different cards.
Who can forget standing with a mate and a hand full of cards and flicking through to the sound of ‘got, got, got,’ and finally ‘need’ so begins the swap or trade has you flick through your pack of card hoping you have a card your friend wants. Some cards would have a value to them not in cash teams but in cards. Say a Bobby Moore card would cost five cards or more depending on your desperation.
I don’t think I ever completed a collection but for the Esso World Cup Coin Collection but never had the display case so technically not complete. To collect them you needed to have a car, something I had no access to, a motor vehicle so. There was a way around that normally a friend’s dad or a mate who was will to share his doubles.
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