Collecting Football stickers had always been a passion of mine from childhood. I started collecting again in 2016 when my home country Northern Ireland qualified for our first ever European championships.
From memory the hardest part of collecting when I was a kid was getting enough people to swap with to complete collections! However things have changed a lot since the mid 90s and there are now dedicated Facebook groups where you could swap with hundreds of members and complete your albums in next to no time.
Fast forward a few years to June 2022 I started to share my collecting experience on my TikTok channel. Since Covid the hobby seems to have changed a bit where everyone and anyone seems to want to rip people off even on the Facebook collector groups I noticed a lot of the parents complaining about scammers on these pages I had to distance myself from trading solely via the Facebook groups and instead opened an account with laststicker.com. This is similar to eBay where you give one another positive / negative feedback and use good practices like sending one another pictures of the items you will be sending before coming to an agreement.
For some of the rarer collections like the early Champions league collections I have traded with people from Mexico, Canada and Eastern Europe but I could not have done this without laststicker.com. The Champions league collections seemed to me more popular outside the UK where collectors would solely concrete on their domestic collections and who can blame them with the cost of just one collection.
For me nothing beats that feeling of completing an album – something I didn’t do as much as I would have loved to growing up! I am currently on the verge of completing every World Cup album from 2002-2022 and about half way through every champions league album from 2000-2024. It is easy to get sucked into every single collection but I took a decision not to collect the current Euro 2024 collection and focus on outstanding albums for now.
Collecting albums for me is all about having the album fully completed with the stickers stuck in the book, however, a lot of big collectors prefer to complete a full set of stickers and an empty album kept in mint condition which can rise in value as they years go on especially 1994-2006 and the earlier tournaments. I also like to keep the best stickers in my mint keeper top loader binder or send some to be graded.
The great thing about sharing my collection journey on platforms like TikTok and Instagram is meet so many people from what is really a small community compared to other popular pastimes like Fortnite / EAFC – but it is a close community most people I meet look out for one another and help each other out.
When I share my videos of completed albums on TikTok and they go viral it is not how many views it gets gives me satisfaction it is when people of similar age to me comment about how it brings back great memories of that particular album they collected from for example 1994/95 season where you share the same childhood memories and experiences of what it was like to collect back then – pure nostalgia.
I will continue to work my way through old albums whilst building up a portfolio of single stickers for my personal collection I keep in my top loader binder – something a recommend anyone to do as it just looks so cool in a binder and all in one place.
Thanks for reading.
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