World Cup 2026: Math professor calculates Panini costs

Biggest World Cup sticker hunt

Mathematics professor has news for Panini fans

Where people love football, they also love panini. However, filling an album takes time – and money. A math expert has calculated exactly how much.

For many football fans it is part of the game World Cup like goals and celebration pictures: the hunt for the Panini stickers. The sticker giant is setting off with the 2026World Cup album to the penultimate stage of an era, because the contract with FIFA runs in 2030 (after WM in Morocco, Portugal and Spain). And at the time of farewell, collecting becomes more expensive than ever before.

The reason lies primarily in the size of the tournament. At the World Cup 2026 For the first time, 48 teams will compete instead of the previous 32. Accordingly, the sticker album also grows to a record size: 980 stickers have to be collected to fill the album with players, logos, mascots and team photos.

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If you think you only have to buy 980 images, you are wrong. Because when you collect, you inevitably end up with a lot of duplicate stickers. Mathematics professor Christian Hesse from the University of Stuttgart calculated for “tagesschau.de” how expensive the hunt for the entire album can actually be. Accordingly, a collector statistically needs around 7,300 stickers to get all 980 motifs together. At current prices, this corresponds to an average cost of around 1,600 euros for a complete album.

And even with that, the collection wouldn’t be complete. Twelve additional stickers appear in cooperation with Coca-Cola and are not included in the regular packages. They can only be collected via promotional bottles. Statistically, around 37 bottles of Coca-Cola would be needed to obtain these motifs, says Hesse.

The fact that Panini scrapbooks are becoming increasingly expensive is not a new phenomenon. At the 2014 World Cup, a package with five stickers cost 60 cents. Four years later, 90 cents were already due – a price increase of 50 percent. At the same time, the albums became more and more extensive. While 448 stickers were enough at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, in 2018 there were already 682 images. Even back then, statisticians calculated that a collector without an exchange partner had to buy an average of around 4,840 stickers. The cost for a complete album was calculated at around 870 euros.

If you want to limit your expenses, you won’t be able to avoid swapping in 2026. Duplicate stickers regularly change hands in social networks, online forums and on file sharing sites. Missing images can also can be reordered directly from Panini.