It’s going to cost a lot to collect all the FIFA World Cup stickers

Every Football World Cup edition comes with traditions. You have the opening ceremony, the anthem, and of course, the FIFA World Cup stickers.

For those of you who might not know, the Panini World Cup stickers are an iconic tournament tradition. It started back in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico when the brand Panini made a sticker album featuring stadiums, mascots, players, and teams.

But ever since their first collection in 1970, the brand has been releasing albums for every World Cup. Eventually, it became a tradition to collect them as memorabilia. Fans would buy sticker packs, trade with friends, and sell online all in the name of accomplishing a full World Cup set.

Now, with the Qatar World Cup only a few months away, Panini has recently released its 2022 collection.

The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Sticker Collection

Panini’s official sticker collection for the 2022 FIFA World Cup is already sold out on its online store. The collection includes all 32 of the participating nations. For each team, they have one sticker each for the team photo and the team logo, and 18 base player stickers.

In total, this collection has 670 stickers. But, they sell their stickers in packets, each one containing only five randomly selected pieces. So just like purchasing other sports cards, you won’t know what you get until you open your pack. They also sell an 80-page collection album where collectors can display all the stickers they manage to collect.

But collecting all 670 won’t be easy. And not just because of the number of individual stickers you’d have to find. It would also cost you more than you might expect.

An expensive hobby

In the last World Cup back in 2018, Paul Harper, a mathematician from Cardiff University, calculated how much someone would need to spend in order to complete the full sticker album. Based on the probability formula he made use of, he found that on average, a fan would need to spend around £770 (around PHP 50,300) to complete the book.

To come up with this number, he made sure to keep in the fact that buying multiple packets would result in collecting duplicates, or even triples of the same sticker. You would have needed to buy 4,832 stickers to complete the full collection. That’s a lot.

But this was four years ago. This year’s collection has the same number of stickers, but the price is now higher.

For the 2022 FIFA World Cup stickers, the prices for each packet have increased by 12.5%. With the same number of stickers needed to complete a full album, it would cost around £870 (around PHP 57,000).

But, Harper said that if fans were lucky and never bought a duplicate, they would still need to buy a minimum of 137 packs. With luck, that brings the cost down to £120.60 (around PHP 7,900).

So if you’re planning to complete the entire Panini 2022 World Cup sticker collection, be prepared to spend. Or, start sending your wishes to your lucky star.