Pic: Arsenal’s Joel Campbell opens 100 World Cup Panini packets and still can’t find his own sticker

That’s 500 stickers in total and not a sign of poor Joel. That’s gotta hurt.

Kids and adults alike get giddy at the sight of football sticker albums, particularly in the lead-up to a tournament as big as the World Cup, but all of us know the gut-wrenching feeling when the one player we’re looking for isn’t in the packet and Joel Campbell knows that more than anybody right now. The Arsenal striker, who is currently on loan at Olympiacos and scored a cracker against Manchester United in the Champions League a while back, will be heading to Brazil as part of a Costa Rica side that are 2,000/1 (only Honduras are quoted at longer odds) to win the tournament outright. As excited as any fan about this prospect, Campbell went and bought 100 packets of stickers (500 stickers in all) for the Panini World Cup sticker album, which you would imagine would give him a decent shout of finding himself, considering that when all of the squads are eventually named there will be 736 players travelling to Brazil with the 32 competing nations.

100 sobres y no me encontré #BadLuckCampbell pic.twitter.com/Mwj5MhSkJV — Joel Campbell (@joel_campbell12) April 9, 2014

  That line, according to Google Translate at least, reads: 100 envelopes and I did not find #BadLuckCampbell According to the Daily Mail, however, there are only 640 stickers in total, meaning that Campbell really was sh*t out of luck, but Panini assured him that he is in there (one of 17 Costa Rican players) and, good folks that they are, even offered to send him on his own sticker.

@joel_campbell12 You're in there; we promise! Let us know if you'd like us to send you you! Good luck with the collection; & the tournament! — Panini Stickers (@OfficialPanini) April 10, 2014

  We haven’t seen Campbell’s sticker ourselves yet, of course, but let’s hope for his sake that he ends up taking a better picture that some of his high-profile contemporaries from down through the years...