No matter where, always in demand: Lionel Messi
Foto: imago/Dave Shopland
No big football tournament without the legendary Panini pictures? For decades, the Italian company’s collector’s albums have been a part of it, as has the Adidas ball. But now the game doesn’t run smoothly anymore. Like in Argentina: Ever since Lionel Messi announced that the World Cup in Qatar will be his last, many collectors in particular have wanted to decorate their albums with the superstar. The result: extortionate prices so high that even the government in Buenos Aires felt compelled to intervene.
The suggested retail price for an envelope containing five figuritas is 150 pesos, about 90 cents. However, because Panini had too few pictures printed for the Argentine market – critics say on purpose to stimulate demand – a flourishing black market developed. For two-time world champion Argentina, as for the entire South and North American market, the cards are printed in the country of great soccer rivals and five-time world champion Brazil.
Particularly coveted pieces such as Messi’s “Gold Legends Card” were offered online for 60,000 pesos (around 350 euros), news agencies report. In September, kiosk operators protested in front of the Panini office in the capital Buenos Aires for an increase in delivery quantities. There were demonstrations by annoyed collectors, the police escorted trucks with new deliveries and Economy Minister Matías Tombolini invited the parties involved to a crisis summit.
Panini is now a printing and publishing house that is active in 150 countries and also publishes comics. In 1961, the Panini brothers published the first scrapbook featuring Italian football teams. In Germany, distribution began with the World Cup in 1974. The “Panini Album Munich 74” was “a huge success straight away,” writes the Stickerpoint exchange. In collector circles, prices of several hundred euros are said to have been paid for individual bags. The full album is now estimated at 3000 euros.
The history of scrapbooks goes back over 100 years. These were initially issued by companies as an advertising campaign, also for »King Soccer«. Clubs and their players as collectors’ items only became attractive to publishers with the introduction of the Bundesliga in the 1963 season. By then, five premier leagues had been kicked off in the Federal Republic, which fragmented the potential market too much. Up until the early 1980s, the Bergmann company from Dortmund still dominated the football market. A bag cost 10 cents at the time.
Today, Panini, which has supplanted almost all other collectors’ picture publishers, charges twenty times the price. For a long time, the company from Modena was a family business. But there was a lack of capital for international expansion. Changes of ownership followed, investment companies were swapped in and out, and the group now belongs to a Roman industrialist. The Panini Group launches around 400 collections worldwide every year.
Retail groups, confectionery manufacturers and gas stations like to reward their customers with free football pictures and scrapbooks, especially on special occasions such as the football World Cup. But the growing market also attracted competition. The US confectionery manufacturer Topps, considered the Italians’ fiercest competitor, outperformed them for the first time at the 2024 and 2028 European Championships. This ended Panini’s decades-long business relationship with the European football union Uefa. The publisher announced that this would not prevent Panini from offering its own EM album – only without official symbols and without the trophy named after the first Uefa Secretary General Henri Delaunay.
In the long run, online providers in particular could become even more dangerous. The German Football League has been working with the start-up Sorare for a short time. The French company has been offering an online platform for trading in virtual stickers for three years. Allegedly, Sorare reaches collectors in 185 countries. But can a volatile computer file really replace Lionel Messi’s golden Panini pic?
