Excerpted From 60 Minutes, November 20, 2022
The 2022 World Cup kicked off on Nov. 20 in Qatar, and while you’ll hear all manner of “Oles” and “Allezs” over the next four weeks, this might be the event’s ultimate soundtrack: got, got, need. It’s not the scalpers hawking tickets, it’s the refrain of fans sifting through packs of World Cup stickers. Think soccer’s answer to baseball cards. Before the 1970 World Cup, four brothers in Italy, the Paninis, began printing collectables featuring images of players from every country in the competition. More than 50 years later, fans all over the globe scour for that obscure Serbian goalkeeper or elusive Lionel Messi – hoping to complete their albums. The Panini sticker phenomenon has become a booming, international business and a central part of the World Cup experience.
For millions of soccer fans, the World Cup unofficially began weeks ago, when the Panini stickers for this quadrennial event shot onto the market.
In a classroom in the town of Sudbury, England, in the thrumming cities of Sao Paulo and Mexico City, fans of all stripes embarked on a common treasure hunt: collecting 670 stickers depicting the players and teams from this World Cup. All so they can complete their album.
Francesco Furnari: Listen. If you have gold or Panini sticker today, people will go for the sticker and not the gold.
Jon Wertheim: Panini sticker’s more valuable than gold you’re saying?
Francesco Furnari: Today, yes.
Francesco Furnari is the biggest official Panini distributor in the United States. An Italian Venezuelan American, he is the ultimate Panini sticker evangelist. He’s completed every sticker album since 1974, including the 2022 vintage, many times over.
Francesco Furnari: I have already seven.
Jon Wertheim: You’re a man in your 50s. You have seven albums completed?
Francesco Furnari: And still counting.
A pack costs a $1.20, and Furnari predicts sticker sales from 2022 will reach 100 million packets in the U.S. alone, nearly a billion worldwide.
Jon Wertheim: We’re talking about a little piece of paper with some adhesive on it. What makes this so special?
Francesco Furnari: Jon, you gotta understand that you have all your legends. You have all your best players at a distance of, you know, your hand. You can touch them, you can talk to them. It’s fantastic.
How coveted are these things? When Argentina ran out of stickers in September, its secretary of commerce called an emergency meeting to solve this national crisis.
Jon Wertheim: We live in a digital world. How are these paper stickers still this popular?
Francesco Furnari: This sensation, Jon, to get a pack, to rip it out, to smell it, to open it, and to find the players right here, there is no way you can replicate it in an electronic way.
We went to Modena, Italy, to Panini’s headquarters. The equivalent of Willy Wonka’s factory. Paninis rolled off the press 21 hours a day, 11 million packets a day, each containing five stickers. The headliners: Mbappe, Messi, Modric.
The phenomenon started here, next to the cathedral, at a newspaper kiosk in the center of town. After World War II, Olga Panini, a widow, ran the newsstand with her four sons. Not unlike a soccer team, each had a special skill. The oldest son, Giuseppe, was the dreamer with the big plans.
Laura Panini: He was like a volcano. He had many, many ideas. Giuseppe’s initial idea was to sell cards depicting flowers. And it was a disaster. But they realized that the formula was okay, not the subject.
Short of lire, Giuseppe had, as it were, one last shot on goal. It was 1961 and he turned to a new subject: Italian soccer. It was a hit, especially with the kids. Even if production was rudimentary.
All the stickers were printed and then were cut. And they were mixing with a shovel at the beginning. To make sure there were no duplicates they mixed with a shovel. Then they replaced a shovel with a churn, the one they use normally for making butter or cheese.
Giuseppe’s brother Umberto, the family engineer, invented machinery that mixed stickers to prevent dreaded duplicates in each pack, his contraptions were so successful, the designs are still in use today, 60 years later.
And they enabled the brothers to scale up their ambitions. Before the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, they paid a thousand dollars cash to soccer’s governing body to buy the rights to produce stickers of the players, not least the great Pele. Suddenly “Panini” became chiefly associated not with a sandwich but with a worldwide pastime — the growth of collecting stickers mirroring the growth of soccer.
Antonio Allegra, Panini’s marketing director, told us how collecting the World Cup albums over the decades has become a rite of passage.
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