Katie Gritt has spent the morning dodging London rain to talk about the biggest sticker album her company has ever made. As Head of Marketing at Panini UK, she is steering the brand into a 2026 World Cup that breaks every previous record. Forty-eight nations. Nine hundred and eighty stickers. One hundred and twelve pages. Billions of stickers heading out into the world.
“Sales so far have been fantastic,” Gritt says. “We’re obviously still quite far out, so we’re expecting a big next few weeks.”
She joined Panini three years ago, but the brand had been in her bloodstream long before that. “Italia 90 was my first album that I remember quite vividly. I have an older brother, so he was collecting, and I was obviously annoying him, wanting to help.” A Manchester City fan with a family rooted in non-league football, Gritt now has a 13-year-old son who, when she joined, was “very much in the sweet spot of collecting.” Her own kitchen table was effectively a focus group. “It’s a brand with so much heritage and so much nostalgia, but one that is still so relevant. It’s the best job ever.”
The 2026 album was designed in Modena. “The priority, really, was that we would strip out some of the incidental features. We wanted to make sure that each nation had maximised the amount of players that people were able to collect.” With the field expanded to 48 teams and the final play off slots confirmed late, the design team built contingency pages for every nation that might qualify. “It’s kind of sad when you think the nations that didn’t make it, they were stuck waiting to be printed. It was important to us that the consumer got a very accurate, complete album, and that we didn’t print early to get a few weeks extra sales.”
Packets have grown from five stickers to seven. “There’s so many stickers now in the collection, which is not our fault. With 48 teams, you’ve got to make it work. It will help you collect quicker.”
Scotland’s qualification, their first since 1998, has been treated as its own story. “It was important that the consumers within those nations felt connected to the product for their own reasons.” Panini ran a launch at Hampden Park to mirror Wembley, shot a separate ad with John McGinn replacing Harry Kane’s FaceTime cameo, and recorded the radio spot in a Scottish accent. A Glasgow taxi covered in Scotland stickers is now rolling around the city alongside its London twin. “We’ve got a Panini road show happening from Scotland all the way down to the south of England.”
The Wembley launch on 28 April produced the kind of scenes no marketing team could write into a brief. Former England internationals David James, John Barnes, Gary Cahill and Adam Lallana turned up to talk stickers. “David James turned up with his album, clutching it proudly,” Gritt says. Barnes recounted a fan once stopping him to say, “I had your sticker.” Barnes, deadpan, fired back, “I was a footballer as well, you know.”
The language of the playground is now corporate IP. “Got Got Need is something we use a lot through our marketing. Actually, it’s trademarked to us.” “The purpose of our product is that you swap with your friends. It’s never that you try and complete the whole thing by yourself. We want that shared communication and connection.” Travelling sticker boxes double as pop-up swap shops. “You know that you’re onto something the minute it’s banned in the school playground.”
Female engagement is a strand Gritt now thinks about constantly, and one she has spoken about publicly at the International Sports Convention. The WSL sticker collection, now several editions in, has quietly rewritten some of Panini’s assumptions about who actually collects. “Stickers are really, really popular with girls,” she says. “It’d be really interesting to try and understand why.” Boys, she notes, tend to drift toward trading cards as they get older. Girls stay loyal to the album. The pattern carries straight into the men’s World Cup. “We know we’ve got girls that are collecting the World Cup stickers and are really enthusiastic about it.” Next year’s Women’s World Cup will get its own dedicated marketing push, mirroring the bespoke treatment Scotland received this summer, so that the female football fan is being spoken to directly rather than folded into a general campaign. The audience challenge, Gritt admits, is broad on purpose. “We’re really targeting everybody. The kids, girls and boys collecting. The parents who’ll make the purchase. And the adults who remember it from being a child themselves.”
The heritage runs back to Mexico 1970, the first Panini World Cup album, born from a Modena newsstand and an engineer brother whose sorting machine the company still uses today. “If he hadn’t been an engineer, how long would it have taken them to scale?” Italia 90 gave English collectors Paul Gascoigne. 2014 gave them Wayne Rooney. Every era has its own rare sticker.
South America remains the heartland. “Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil. The volume of stickers that get sold in those countries in a World Cup is phenomenal.” The United States is now one of Panini’s biggest tournament markets, with England and Germany not far behind.
For 2026, the volume alone tells the same timeless story. Billions of stickers, 48 countries, millions of children swapping stickers to complete their album, and trying desperately to get that shiny!
