Here’s how much it’ll cost you to fill up your Panini World Cup sticker album

But don't worry, it's not quite what it seems...

Si Lloyd

Got, got, need…

With a World Cup on the horizon, this is an exciting time for football fans.

And what better way to channel such excitement than focusing all your efforts on collecting stickers of the players set to feature at this summer’s tournament?

Yep, attempting to fill Panini’s World Cup sticker album has become something of a tradition for fans in the lead up to the tournaments – be it primary school kids or fully grown adults who really should know better.

One point that often gets overlooked by those who become completely fixated with completing the collection is that it costs actual real life money to do so. Lots of it, too, if you listen to an estimate given by maths expert Professor Paul Harper, from Cardiff University’s School of Mathematics.

As highlighted by the BBC, he estimates it will cost a whopping €877.15 to fill the album – double the cost of the Euro 2016 collection two years ago.

The fact there are more stickers to collect – 682 – partly explains this, as does the increase in cost: a pack of five stickers will now set you back around or above 90 cents on average.

Prof Harper calculated a formula to include the least probable number of duplicate stickers, eventually demonstrating that on average, someone hoping to fill the album would need to buy 967 packets – a whopping 4,832 stickers.

Of course, it might not cost you quite so much.

As Harper points out, it’s possible to do it for €124.27 but this would involve buying 137 packets without getting a single duplicate. Obviously, that’s very, very, very unlikely.

With that in mind, we should also point out that swapping stickers with friends drastically reduces the cost. And frankly, who in their right mind collects stickers without doing this?

Prof Harper adds that with 10 friends swapping stickers, it would cost €280 on average to fill the album.

Panini have moved to reassure collectors, saying in a statement:

“If you have difficulty swapping, you can send off to Panini for your missing stickers.

“The theoretical cost calculated by the academics assumes that the collector is in a bubble with no one to swap with or no access to the internet to send off to our missing stickers service.”

Not quite as drastic as Prof Harper’s estimate might have made it seem.

So… anyone need that Panama shiny?