How I Became King Of The Swapsies

April was when it all began.

The cold spell broke and moods began to brighten as the school defrosted in the fresh spring sunshine. On the first Sunday of that month the red topped newspapers gave away Panini Italia 90 sticker albums with a starter pack of stickers and newsagents erected cardboard Panini display stands on their shop counters.  And so it was that football stickers entered my life.

STICK WITH PANINI was their slogan when the brothers Panini began selling collectable football stickers in the early Sixties. Before long Umberto and Giuseppe had a lucrative business and were lightening parental pockets beyond their native Italy and across half of Europe. The business model is evil genius in its simplicity. Give away the shiny sticker album then punt out the stickers needed to fill it in sealed packets, masking the identity of the five players within. Each sticker numbered so as to be stuck into the corresponding gap in the album. In 2009 they sold over a billion packs of stickers across one hundred countries, and it wasn't even a World Cup year.

The Panini craze was in full swing within two days and any third year boy who didn't have an album on Monday made damned  sure they were in the game by Tuesday, tooled up and ready to trade.

Twenty four teams competed in Italia 90 and most got a double page spread, seventeen players per nation, plus squad shot and team badge. The team badges were set against a reflective silver foil background and called foileys. Foileys were highly prized. Most countries got a two page spread, but the minor teams had to suffer the indignation of being crammed onto a single page. In these cases, stickers were laid horizontally as each hosted two players.  These minnows were Cameroon, Costa Rica, United Arab Emirates, S. Korea and Egypt. Shame really.

There was also an opening section which included a stadia guide and a series of poses by Ciao, the worst mascot in World Cup history, a block man with a football for a head.  Poor show by comparison to Pique the wide smiled, giant moustache and sombrero sporting Mexican from four years previous.

These totaled another thirty seven blank spaces. A total of four hundred and forty eight sticker-less holes to fill. The math′s is complex, but at twenty pence per packet of six stickers and accounting for the ever decreasing percentage strike rate, I calculated that to complete that album was going to cost me a shed load of money.

As any user of substance regular or otherwise will tell you, as a habit grows you must learn how to feed it above and beyond your own meager means. At first, one only buys occasionally, just for fun. Then one finds oneself indulging all the time, spending all available cash and still requiring further supplies. So what to do then? One must borrow, one must steal, or one must trade.

Swapsies were my first, and to date, most successful stab at dealing. Certain stickers had a higher frequency of occurrence than others. You could hardly give away a David Beasant (England) he was that common. And even though Yong Hwan Chung><Jong Soo Chung (South Korea) popped up in almost every other pack, the Chungs were worth at least three Daves.