Adults have gotten into trading Panini 2026 World Cup stickers.
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As the 2026 World Cup looms, many fans of the beautiful game are preparing to shell out eye-watering sums to watch their national team play."Around a thousand in total," Ryan Hannon, 29, told Business Insider. "But it's worth it!"Hannon is not referring to much-coveted stadium tickets. This is the amount he has spent on Panini stickers since he started collecting in 2018."For me, it's the nostalgia. It's a proper childhood core memory that brings me back," Hannon said.You might remember Panini stickers from your childhood. The premise is simple: you buy a physical booklet with blank spaces for each player and team badge, plus bonus stickers for mascots, host stadiums, and sponsors. Then you trade your duplicates with other collectors until the book is full.
Hannon is one of millions of so-called "mature collectors" who are obsessed with the stickers. Encouraged by his 8-year-old son, he trades on a Facebook group with more than 13,000 members. This is the wild west, where people post cribbed handwritten notes or Excel sheets listing teams and player numbers, and increasingly existential musings on the nature of the swap market.
