A 1970 World Cup album signed by Pelé sold at auction for £10,450. The same object a kid once stuck with saliva in the school playground, transformed half a century later into a collector's item worth more than a used car. That is the paradox underpinning the Panini empire, a company that turns over between 1.6 and 1.9 billion euros a year selling printed paper at a million and a half packets.
The argument is uncomfortable for anyone who thinks this is about childhood nostalgia. Panini is not a sticker factory. It is a machine for exploiting sports licences with margins many tech companies would envy, and its business depends on a handful of contracts it does not own. The Italian company reported around 400 million euros in EBITDA in 2024 on those 1.6 billion euros in revenue, a margin of 25%. It sells cardboard. And it earns as if it were selling software.
What is truly revealing is how much weight a single tournament carries. Panini estimates that 50% of its 2026 sales will come from the World Cup. Half a full year's business packed into a four-week event. In 2022 it already set a record with 720 million dollars in Qatar World Cup products, and for 2026 it projects 1.48 billion dollars, around 1.4 billion euros. The entire structure — the factories in Italy and Brazil, the 150 distribution countries, the sticker museum opened in 1986 — revolves around a calendar controlled by FIFA and one that will soon no longer be Panini's.
There lies the knot. Panini signed with FIFA in 1970, launched the first official album for the Mexico World Cup, and for half a century held the World Cup exclusivity as if it were a natural right. It was not. It was a contract. And contracts expire. The Champions League already slipped away to Topps in 2022, and it has been announced that from 2031 Fanatics, the owner of Topps, is expected to produce the World Cup albums. In plain terms, the company that derives half its revenue from one tournament is going to lose that tournament. The 2026 World Cup is, in part, a farewell dressed up as a celebration.
Meanwhile, the mechanics of the business remain a small masterpiece of applied psychology. Each packet contains seven stickers and costs around 1.50 euros. The 2026 album will have 980 stickers across 112 pages, compared with the 271 in that Mexico 70 edition. Completing the collection by buying packets, if none came up as duplicates, would cost around 210 euros. But duplicates do come up, of course. That is the engine. The design is built to generate volume and repeat purchases, so that "I still need" becomes a cost nobody planned for. Panini is estimated to print more than 2 billion packets for 2026, and industry estimates point to between 500 and 800 million sold and around 35 million albums, which would put close to 7 billion stickers into circulation. Paper stickers. In 2026.
The terrain where the real money battle is fought, however, is the secondary market. Here cardboard becomes a financial asset. The Messi "Black 1-of-1" sticker from the 2022 World Cup, a unique print run, could reach around 200,000 dollars at auction according to circulating estimates. A Messi debut sticker from the Germany 2006 album trades in the hundreds of dollars. eBay, Catawiki and MercadoLibre have created a parallel market where the child swapping duplicates in the playground coexists with the investor treating a hologram the way others treat a work of art. In Chile more than 8,000 collectors gathered at a single swap event, in a country whose national team did not even qualify. Passion does not need to be on the pitch.
Demographics explain why this is not dying. The customer is no longer just the kid. They are adults between 20 and 40 with spending power and a nostalgic gap to fill. FIFA reported 6 million active users on its 2018 digital album, a figure that reveals a mature audience, not a school playground. Panini has spent decades weaving that intergenerational thread — parents teaching children to stick stickers — and that is why it sells in mature European markets, which according to industry estimates account for between 50% and 60% of the business, while Latin America contributes around 10% and Asia-Pacific emerges as the promise at an estimated 15% to 20%.
The counterargument is serious and worth looking at directly. Logic would suggest that paper should have died by now. There are NFTs, apps, games like Sorare that digitise the sticker and turn it into a token. Morgan Stanley estimates the global collectibles market at more than 100 billion dollars a year, and much of the growth points towards the digital. Panini knows this and has not stood still. It launched its first virtual album in 2006 with Coca-Cola, has an NFT marketplace in the United States, and for 2026 is embedding physical stickers in Coca-Cola bottles — one billion stickers — connecting the analogue ritual with mass distribution. But none of those bets has replaced paper. They accompany it. The physical sticker remains the product that pays the bills, and that, in the middle of the token era, is almost a cultural anomaly.
Competition, furthermore, is unforgiving. Topps, now under Fanatics, reached around 1.6 billion dollars in 2024, essentially level with Panini, and it arrives with the Champions League in its pocket and the FIFA deal promised for 2031. Panini's Spanish subsidiary turned over 93 million euros in 2025 with 24% growth, a sign that the muscle is still there. But a business that is growing while watching its most profitable licence being taken away lives a contradiction that no 25% margin fully conceals.
The question that remains is what Panini will be once it no longer has the World Cup. A brand with 64 years of history, a museum, a tradition stuck to the childhood of half the planet, and a secondary market where a signed Pelé is worth £10,450 does not evaporate because it loses a contract. But you cannot sign one on nostalgia alone. The day a kid sticks their first World Cup sticker with a Fanatics logo in the corner, we will know how much that 1970 handshake was really worth.
