For the past two weeks, my nine-year-old daughter and her friends have been obsessing over Panini’s World Cup sticker books. The tradition, which started in 1970, after a few Italian brothers who ran a newspaper business decided to get into collectible stickers, is very simple: kids get a book with a space for every player in the tournament, and then they buy packs of stickers, each of which has a photo of a player and some basic data: his name, what country he represents, and so on. Unlike modern sports trading cards, which are not only hefty but often bedazzled with autographs, jersey patches, and random holograms, the Panini stickers are flimsy and meant to be abused. After seeing which players they got, kids unpeel the stickers and put them in their assigned spots. The point is to try to fill up the book, or at least the page, with your favorite team, and then to trade any duplicates or unwanteds with your friends. My daughter, for example, has a Cristiano Ronaldo sticker that we haven’t yet put in her book because I have successfully propagandized her against him. We are looking to trade Ronaldo for a lot of Koreans.
I’ve been trying to figure out why this hobby feels so wholesome. The most obvious explanation is that the sticker books are inherently nostalgic, transporting parents to their own childhoods, when they were trying to find Thierry Henry or Ronaldinho or David Beckham. What this means, one hopes, is that there is a limit to how much the books will be ruined by our modern, digitized, and optimization-obsessed culture, because it’s hard to feel nostalgic when something you used to care about gets converted into a bunch of drop-down menus and a payment layer. (There is a Panini app, with a “digital sticker book,” because how could there not be, but it’s not nearly as popular as the analog system: physical book, physical stickers.)
The stickers have also mostly evaded the gambling spirit that has taken over sports-card collecting over the past thirty years, in which the entire point of the activity is to find extremely rare “inserts” that can be sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Instead of looking for a ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, children are trying to find some ultra-rare Victor Wembanyama card that they can sell on eBay or to some unscrupulous reseller who makes his money manipulating children. As with digitization, Panini hasn’t entirely avoided it: there is a market for stickers with “rare” borders, plus a few one-of-one collectibles—a black-bordered Messi sticker might fetch you a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But the prices for the vast majority of stickers are pretty low, which means that no vulture is out there buying up all the sticker packs and trying to resell them at inflated prices to impressionable children hoping to win the lottery.
This market inefficiency is almost certainly an accident. In May, FIFA announced that it would be ending its partnership with Panini, and that, from 2031 going forward, Fanatics, a sports-apparel company mostly known for poor quality and rapacious expansion, will take over the official sticker business. One can comfortably speculate that the Fanatics version will be more expensive, more gambling-driven, less fun, and full of knock-on costs and upsells that try to exploit a children’s game. This is not to say that Panini are saints or immune to the lure of making money, only that they haven’t yet been able to wreck the joyful pointlessness of what they created more than fifty years ago.
As a parent of a nine-year-old and a three-year-old, I’ve found myself thinking quite a bit about pointlessness in general lately. Sometimes I’ll drive the nine-year-old to soccer training or a math class or what-have-you, and if every minute doesn’t feel optimized, I’ll quietly tell my wife that it was a waste of time and that we are not going back, even if I’m certain that our daughter had a lot of fun. Or I’ll be talking to other parents of three-year-olds about what shows they allow their children to watch and I’ll realize that all of us have an ad-hoc and mostly arbitrary value system whereby some shows (CoComelon, say, or a YouTube toys series) are regarded as pointless and to be rigorously avoided, while others (Ms. Rachel, “Bluey,” Mr. Rogers) are seen as conveying information, or good cheer, or some other valuable side effect. Within this cloud of anxious expectation, I suppose it’s nice to watch children do something so unoptimized and noneducational, even wasteful.
Jay Caspian Kang
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