I was doing quite well at getting my football-averse eight-year-old invested in the World Cup, with our daily update to his official wall chart giving him a lovely bit of admin to start each morning, and a sense of investment in a tournament he can barely watch since 70 per cent of games take place after his bedtime.
Seeing his joy at this, I did what every pathetic and pandering dad has done since time immemorial: I bought more things. Namely, the Official Sticker Album of Fifa World Cup 2026 and a frankly reckless amount of sticker packs. To my surprise and delight, he’s become utterly obsessed with filling it up, even accreting tertiary levels of knowledge about the teams and their squads that I do not possess myself. Did you know that nine of Brazil’s team go by mononyms? Did you know South Korea has six players named Lee? Did you know that refreshing, delicious Coca-Cola is the official beverage partner of the 2026 Fifa World Cup?
Well, I do now, and so does my son, whose first ever sticker book is also his first experience of the queasy mix of nerdy stats and craven capitalism that modern football represents, and an unmissable opportunity for me to deliver the first ever broadsheet book review of this most vaunted form of literature.
My first sign that these stickers might not be all they’re promised was when I tried to open one of the bloody things. Peeling each from its backing becomes a deadening grind in which you massage the edges of a micron-thin piece of paper like a safe-cracker probing for weak spots. I was obsessed with football sticker books as a kid and don’t remember them being sealed together with the chemical bond of a hydrogen atom. Granted, my son does it with much less fuss, because he has the small, dainty hands of a porcelain doll, but even he has given up on several occasions, leaving a small, sad pile of dog-eared men in the corner of our sittingroom.
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Things do not improve once you attempt to stick them in since they’re not numbered sequentially, but by nation. Crumlin’s Cape Verdean sweetheart Pico Lopes, for example, is listed as CPV4. Since the teams are listed in order of their starting group, you are required to thumb your way to the opening pages to see where each nation is listed, and then trek back from there. This might seem a small quibble, but in our age of perfectly fashioned user experience, it feels a little like having to switch your phone on and off each time you want to read an email.
It’s probably smart that the album features just 18 players for each team, plus a badge and squad photo, since a 48-team tournament adds up to 1,248 players, and representing every single one would begin to feel like a census of every adult male on Earth. Unfortunately, they select these names far in advance of squad announcements, which means almost every page features players who won’t be playing. While England fans might smirk at the inclusion of Trent Alexander-Arnold, Cole Palmer and Phil Foden, one does wonder how a Ghanaian fan would feel, since a whopping eight out of the 18 players listed in their section didn’t make their final squad. In all, the book features 119 players who will not be lacing up their boots in North America – which, at just shy of 14 per cent of the total, seems a lot.
In fairness, this matters little to my son, who knows few footballers by name and is less interested in a perfectly accurate catalogue than in the capitalistic accumulation of small collectable units themselves. If it’s capitalism he’s after, the book certainly delivers, from the double-page backspread dedicated to Official Partner Coca-Cola to the three separate advertising slots allotted to Lynx deodorants – including two tear-out scratch-and-sniff samples – and another for Fifa’s official app.
Perhaps no part of the book is more emblematic of this queasiness than its very first pages, which feature a gloriously banal welcome note from Fifa president Gianni Infantino. “This album is not just a collectible,” he says, which is nice to know since I’ve only just realised that the cost of filling in every single sticker would probably approach €1,500. “It is a symbol of the joy, passion and anticipation that uniquely define the Fifa World Cup.”
A beautiful, wholesome idea that’s nevertheless riddled with errors, frustrating to engage with and built to maximise every penny of extra profit from football obsessives, young and old? This album may well define Fifa more than its president knows.
Source: The Irish Times
