Between swapping on the playground, pestering local shop owners, and — of course — incessantly hunting for shinies, I spent a significant chunk of my youth collecting Panini football stickers, burning a great deal of my pocket money in the process.
In my hometown in Scotland, the collection of choice was the annual Scottish Premier League sticker album, which every year served as something of a sacred tome to my football-fanatic peers. I remember the joy of getting my hands on the final sticker to complete my 1999-2000 collection (shoutout to Kilmarnock midfielder Alan Mahood), as much as I recall the number of school trousers I ruined under the weight of transporting my veritable downtown high-rise of doublers in my pocket every Monday to Friday.
Imagine my delight, then, to find upon arriving in Brazil in 2010 that the football sticker craze was still alive and well across the Atlantic Ocean. Advertisements for the World Cup 2010 Panini sticker album were everywhere, and the giddy 10-year-old within me decided to pick up an album and a few packs of stickers to fulfill a guilty pleasure. My excitement, however, was short-lived.
“What do you mean the albums are sold out?” I exclaimed, in broken Portuguese, to the owner of my new local newspaper stand.
I quickly realized that in 2010, everyone I came into contact with in Brazil was collecting World Cup stickers: young and old, men and women, football fans, and non-football fans.
The same week, while changing subway lines at a particularly busy station in São Paulo, I ran into the largest sticker-swapping event I had ever seen, with throngs of people rifling through piles of doublers and making oh-so-important trades. Though I was yet to properly understand the language, I learned the Portuguese for “got, got, need.”
Brazil’s football frenzy
Collecting stickers is an important part of World Cup culture in Brazil, a country that literally drops whatever it is doing to watch the most successful national team in history play once every four years. In the months leading up to international football’s biggest tournament, Brazil’s schools, workplaces, bars, and streets double up as venues for swap meets, and newspaper stands do a roaring trade.
There is no shortage of bizarre anecdotes to illustrate just how keen Brazilians are on collecting stickers. Ahead of the 2014 World Cup held in Brazil, criminals...
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