Got, Got, Need. Say it to any football fan and their eyes will light up. They say we haven’t cracked time travel, but those three words can transport any adult football fan immediately back to their childhood.
They refer, of course, to the timeless joy of sticker collecting, specifically that memory we all have of flicking through a pile of a mate’s swaps on the playground.
The journey toward completing a sticker album creates a lot of core memories – opening your first packet, getting a shiny, completing a page, the smell of the album even – but it is no coincidence that the phrase we most associate with it all relates not to buying stickers but to swapping them.
As usual, boffins (the only term that can be used for this sort of thing) have worked out the likely cost of completing the World Cup 2022 album, but while the mainstream media have predictably drawn attention to the amount it could take to do so without swapping – “if no swapping, then based on probability it will cost you £883.80” – it once again got us thinking about how cheaply we could complete the album with swapping.
“It’s 90p for five stickers and there are 670 to collect. That works out as £120.60 if you have to collect all and swap all spares,” Kieran Maguire wrote on Twitter. In other words, if you can find a one-for-one swap for every duplicate sticker you unpack, you’ll only need to buy 134 packets.
But anyone who’s ever done this before will know that not all stickers are equal. If you’ve got a shiny in your swaps pile, you’re putting a premium on it. That’s worth at least three standard stickers.
So it got me thinking: could you complete the album without buying a single packet? It might sound crazy, but I first had this idea before the 2018 World Cup and actually did really well. Enough friends were collecting that I was able to turn 31 stickers from the starter pack into more than 150 within a few weeks.
Swap events were the next step on the path to glory, but I had two very young children at the time and had made the classic new parent mistake of believing I could still have a life in those early stages. Ergo I never got to a swap event and my quest remained incomplete.
But four years on, still fuelled by that initial success from 2018, I’m convinced it can be done. So to quote the meme, ‘Ah Shit, Here We Go Again’.
The Starter Pack
This year’s starter pack, usually priced at £4.99 (I have seen it cheaper), comes with five…
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