The men addicted to collecting football stickers

They live amongst us, yet they live in a totally different world to ours. Most are carrying out normal jobs, perhaps to fund their addiction. All are hooked, irretrievably.

I’ve been speaking to a number of grown men, most in their thirties, who are addicted to collecting football stickers. In remarkably candid interviews, they told me about how deep their habits go, why they feel the compulsion to collect and what they’ve done to feed the addiction…

Dave is a salaried teacher. He described how quickly he got hooked. “It gets addictive pretty quickly. Recently, I went in every newsagents on Green Lanes, trying to find one that sold stickers, without any luck.”

'Swaps' or 'swapsies' are the stock in trade for any sticker user, and finding a coveted 'need' can become a compulsion. People will sometimes go to extreme lengths to get a need, as Dave explained to me.

“I once arranged to meet someone I hadn’t seen for about 6 years on a street corner in Covent Garden just to swap at 6pm on Tuesday. We didn’t go for a drink, we just showed up with our clear plastic bag of swaps, made the transaction and left.”

Are there any players who have just eluded them?

“Mehdi Mostefa was the last one I needed for the last world cup”, says Dan.

“Daley Blind! No one in our swap circle could get their hands on him. A friend of mine ended up meeting a 14-year-old boy from Gumtree to get his hands on the Blind sticker. The kid’s dad dropped him round and waited in the car. Marchisio was also pretty elusive as well in 2014, but then he was free with the Euro 2016 book,” shares Dave.

Then there’s the social censure. Dan has to plan so that he isn’t seen.

“If I’m regularly buying from the same shop, I tend to rotate which till I go to. I assume if I go back day after day to the same person they’ll think I’m insane.”

So why do it? Generally, I found the compulsion came from a regressive sense of nostalgia. Nick has been collecting since the eighties.

“I started back in the mid-eighties, when I was in primary school. I remember having the Football ’85 annual. I would have been 5 or 6."

"I also remember the Mexico ’86 World Cup album. Back in the eighties though, it wasn’t just football, y’know? Big films used to have sticker albums too. 'Back to the Future' had one and so did 'Masters of the Universe' – so that would have been around ‘87. They were mostly stills from the film. I also remember having the football ’87 album. After that, I kind of stopped for a while.”

Nick picked up the habit again in 2006.

"I walked into a shop and the thought occurred – I can actually buy all those stickers now. That’s in my power. I bought a box on ebay, it arrived and it was a great day. It was actually the same day that Liverpool beat Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-final, where Luis Garcia scored the winning goal. It was brilliant."

"Since then, I’ve done every major tournament. It started as nostaligia, but, these days, to be honest, it feels a bit more compulsive. If I didn’t do it, I’d feel there would be a gap. It’s slightly more joyless for me these days to be honest.”

What started for him as a rather solitary experience soon turned into group-using. Grown men swapping football stickers may sound chaotic, but, as I’ve learned, there are strict social codes to be adhered to.

Stu, a successful media professional, set up a swaps group through work. He talked me through some of the regulations they have enforced.

“The rules are written democratically by the group. New rules can be written, but must be put to the whole group for approval first."

1) No more than 10 packs a day – otherwise it’s just not fair. And buying a box is rubbish and not fair. It’s basically like buying a computer game and then just getting all of the cheat codes for it straight away. To me, I just don’t see the fun in that.

2) You can only look to the internet if you have 5 stickers or less left to collect.

3) During swaps, non-shineys are worth 1 other non-shiney, whereas a shiney can be traded for 2 non-shineys. Alternatively, 1 shiney can be traded for another. This is the standard, accepted universal currency of swapping.

4) Under 100, gloves are off. This is a new rule that we have introduced and contravenes rule 3 under certain circumstances. Basically, once you’ve got less than 100 stickers left to collect, deals can be made that contravene the usual trading laws of swapsie club.”

I wondered how hard this was to police.

“There are two lads in the office – George and Teggsy – who have been sharing a book, but still going out and buying their 10 packets a day anyway. We told them that they’re welcome to be in our swaps club, but that we wouldn’t consider their final results part of the standings. It’s a bit like when Marseille won the European Cup in 1993 and were later found to have been involved in corruption. Their European trophy wasn’t affected, but the international community frowned upon them.”

Stu’s managing well, but he did allude to “obsessions” he’d developed.

“Last World Cup, I became obsessed with Honduras because of the Panini album. If you look at the Honduras team, they all look really, really annoyed. Apparently, that’s because their photos weren’t taken properly like everyone else. Instead, they used photos from a game in which their National Anthem was being booed.”

On the whole, it all sounds quite consuming. There’s a lot of admin involved and a definite risk of looking a bit silly. Is the final, completed book worth it? Does it fulfil these men?

Nick spoke to me about completing a book, and what that feels like:

"I have a ritual. I sit down and go from cover-to-cover, looking at every page, alone. I sigh, and then I close it and put it on the shelf with the others. It’s a bit like at the end of 'Raiders of The Lost Ark', where the ark goes back into the big warehouse, never to be seen again. That’s what it feels like when I complete a book. I always feel a bit underwhelmed really."

Originally published 9 June 2016.