If you intend to buy the album of European Championship stickers – you can find it on the website of Topps, an American trading card company that acquired the rights in 2022 – you should be aware that it will be an album different from all those that preceded it . Not only because it is no longer made by Panini but rather by Topps, and not only because the design of the stickers is very different from what collectors and enthusiasts are used to. This album will be different from all those that preceded it, above all because it is the result of a commercial “war” between the two companies, Topps and Panini, which produced the same result that all commercial wars always produce: fragmentation of the market and expansion of ‘offer.
To clarify: anyone who wants the 2024 European Championship sticker album must buy the Topps one, but must be aware that in the stickers of five teams – Italy, France, Germany, Spain and England – there will only be the faces of the players and not the shirts of the respective national teams. Why? Because these five national teams have a partial exclusivity contract with Panini, a contract which provides that only Panini can make stickers depicting their jerseys. Which in fact has done just this, and here we come to the fragmentation of the market and the expansion of the offer mentioned above: those who want can also not buy the album of European Championship 2024 stickers published by Topps and instead buy World Class 2024, the album created by Panini composed of stickers of Italy, France, Germany, Spain and England, with the faces of the footballers photographed wearing the shirt of their respective national team. This is a choice that can be justified not only by hard and pure passion – the album of European Championship stickers has been a Panini product since 1977 – but also by economic constraints: to complete the Topps album you have to find 728 stickers, for the Panini one 387 are enough. Even if, we know, the true enthusiast, the radical collector will not choose one or the other: he will choose one And the other, will complete both albums.
The complications don’t end there, though. Not only do some teams have exclusivity with one company or another, but also some footballers have it with one company or another. For example: in the Topps album, among the stickers of France there will not be that of Mbappé. Why? Because Mbappé has ceded this particular piece of his image rights to Panini, which is therefore the only company that can make an Mbappé trading card, with or without the French national team shirt. Same thing, as reported by the Guardian, for some England players like Phil Foden. And what do we do in this case, how do we resolve the issue? We print the sticker of another footballer, obviously, because the spaces to be filled in the Topps album are and will remain. But which footballer? Apparently, of any one: to make up for the lack of Foden, in the England stickers there is one of Luke Thomas. Who has never even been called up by the English national team. And we can already imagine the thriving and highly competitive market on which these strange stickers will be traded in the future: how much will the sticker portraying a footballer in the national team jersey who has never even been called up to the national team be worth to a collector in the future? Maybe a special album will be released in the same future. From Topps or Panini, who knows.
