Have you got Euro 2016 fever yet? For those lucky enough to have tickets for the matches in France this summer, perhaps the excitement took hold months ago. Now the domestic and European seasons have come to a close and the final 23-man squads have been announced, there may finally be enough time and energy to make the emotional investment. Perhaps you don’t give a monkey’s either way. But I do and it started in earnest for me when I was given my Euro 2016 sticker book.
I got it by chance, handed out as a freebie to fans at Wembley when England played Holland in March, and thought nothing of taking it for the journey home, some topical reading to help digest the 2-1 defeat. But by the time I arrived home, I had developed a nostalgic itch that I had to scratch. I must finish this album. I fell into the trap laid by Panini – the Italian company that has long produced the stickers – and have spent the past two months or so spending my way out.
Requiring 680 stickers or 136 packets at 50p each, the absolute minimum you can hope to part with is £68 (up £4 from the World Cup 2014 edition) to fill the Euro 2016 album, so it is a considerable challenge to take on and not one that can be done alone. Apart from the emotional burden – I genuinely have had nightmares about the 11 Pontus Wernblooms that I now own (it seems I am not the only one) and the one Gary Cahill that I don’t – as any self-respecting collector knows, in battling the law of diminishing returns as one’s book fills and swells in weight, swapping is essential.
But how? These days there are internet forums, an official Panini app where you can create and order a digital sticker of yourself and even a hashtag – #gotgotneed – to trade with people on Twitter. But swap shops – a real-life, analogue, tangible place for collectors to meet and trade their wares – do still exist.
“I stopped spending money on beer, quit drinking and started collecting these stickers instead,” says Dave, a stocky tattooed man in his 30s from the Wirral, at one of these swap shops, organised by the National Football Museum in Manchester; my first sticker event. We are among 30-40 fully grown men and women buzzing around the foyer, eyeing up other swap piles and eventually making nervous eye contact, like a strange speed-dating session.
But it’s great: a free, ageless, genderless affair and while Dave is puzzled as to why I have made the rookie mistake of actually bringing my sticker album, rather than leaving it at home in pristine condition, he agrees to sit down with me, despite the fact that my swapsies aren’t in numerical order. Five minutes of chat (about how Panini decides who is in each squad months in advance, with Andrea Pirlo, Phil Jones and Diego Costa conspicuously included) later, I’m eight new swaps to the good; a full-length snap of the former Crystal Palace and current Hungary goalkeeper Gabor Kiraly among those now nestling tightly in my shirt pocket. It’s an education, too, a quick glance at Gabor tells me that he’s now 40, playing for a club called Szombathelyi Haladas, and is still rocking those grey tracksuit bottoms. Excellent news. I’m having a whale of a time and I’m not alone: “Joe Allen! Finally! I’m Welsh, you see,” a woman explains on the next table.
My business with Dave complete, I move on. Next up is Gary, from Bury, who has completed every single World Cup and European Championship book since 1978. He has been coming to these gatherings for years. “My mates give me some stick but I get used to it,” he says. “USA 94 was a tricky one. England didn’t qualify, so there wasn’t the same interest. But I got it done, there’s a network of us who take it a bit more seriously. I saw Carlos Tévez in here once, just after he moved to City, with a cap pulled low over his face.”
There are a few different types of adult collector: those who are unabashedly proud, such as Dave and Gary, those who are publicly sheepish but not quite out of the closet – perhaps like Tévez – and those caught in a halfway house: a parent encouraging a child into starting a collection so providing an excuse to tell the newsagent, a journalist allegedly “just doing this as research for an article”.
At the age of nearly 30 I have been all of these people at some time or another but am now firmly in the first camp: a chest-beating, shiny-chasing stickerhead. I never intended to take it so seriously – chastising myself for lazily placing Lukasz Piszczek outside of his box, quivering at the sight of a shiny Iceland badge hiding in the 10th packet of the day – but I am happily way past the point of no return. If anybody has a Gary Cahill, please let me know.
