IT’S BEEN ANOTHER bad week for fans of nostalgia, with pre-tournament stickering the latest pillar of our lives to fall to the progress of capitalism.
American-based Topps have the official rights to the Euro 2024 sticker album, ending Panini’s 47-year run of control. Panini, however, have deals with England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and France, which means Topps are not allowed to display these players in official kit.
And that’s only those players whom Topps are allowed to include. Panini have individual players deals too, which means some high profile squad members – including Phil Foden and John Stones – are not included in the Topps’ official album.
Topps have therefore padded their album out with players like Luke Thomas, whom the eagle-eyed will notice has never been capped by England. No man on a football sticker should be surprised to open a packet and find himself.
Panini, needing to do something with their painfully incomplete collection of stars, have launched an album featuring just these five squads.
Also, because of the introduction of the Nations League and the bloating of the football calendar, the Euros play-offs were not completed until March, at which point Topps had gone to print. They therefore had to take a punt on the results of the play-offs, which is why you can go out and buy the stickers of Wales players who are currently lying beside Dubai swimming pools.
Prior to Euro 2024, completing a sticker album was an expensive business but it was at least theoretically possible; a tangible, fixed goal on the horizon towards which we could all strive. But now there is no such thing as a single, complete album, the latest violation of the verities of our childhood.
But of course we should not be surprised, as sport has been trending this direction for some time.
Think of Panini’s as a kind of adhesive Super League, with Topps a vision of the diluted and diminished left-behind; a gluey parable of LIV Golf against the PGA Tour, retailing at €1.20 a packet.
Splintering has been the name of the game for decades now. It is on this fissured rock the Premier League has built its fortune, divvying up games and putting them behind the respective paywalls of different broadcasters in return for dazzling sums of money. Given the vast majority of viewers have an allegiance to a specific team rather than the Premier League itself, this is not an example of consumer-friendly competition: it’s a carve-up.
But the cracks are travelling deeper now, and penetrating sports themselves. The modern greed of various athletes, executives, owners and administrators has led to a kind of fracking of professional sport, where the injection of vast amounts of money has been designed to cause splits and fissures.
But sport itself will ultimately not survive this process. We can see it already with professional golf, where the PGA Tour is bleeding eyeballs because of the defection of talent to LIV, which nobody is actually watching. Golf has voluntarily reduced its relevance to four weeks a year, as it is only at the majors in which the sport resembles anything like a unified whole.
Manchester City’s lawsuit against the Premier League’s rules around related party transactions – sponsorship from companies linked to club owners, effectively – is another rubicon in this regard. City argue these rules are unlawful, although they have been enacted under the Premier League’s agreed rules, via a two-thirds majority vote among clubs.
The ramifications for the competition if City win are stark: it may have the effect of completely invalidating the Premier League’s voting rules. What, then, is to stop City and Newcastle blowing the rest of the competition out of the water with their oil reserves? Or what’s to stop Liverpool taking one of their home games off to New York? Or Manchester United hogging onto a greater share of their broadcast revenues? Or Aston Villa and West Ham merging into one giant claret-and-blue superpower?
At that point all bets are off and the ‘most competitive league in the world’ will have lost its selling point and football fans will have lost another part of their lives.
The profit principle has to come second to a general agreement to preserve the unity of the sport and realising competition, compromise and losing is part of the deal, even if that means leaving some cash on the table.
But we are not holding our breath on that one.
In the mean-time we can celebrate the simple beauty of a major international tournament, which has been bloated and complicated but not yet fractured and ruined by the self-interest of those involved.
Even if, at some point over the next month, you tear open a sticker packet to be met with the face of Luke Thomas and realise that, truly, the game is nearly up.
