Inflation pushes average cost of filling Panini 2022 World Cup sticker album to £870
Inflation has come for the football sticker album. Collecting and completing the official Panini Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022 album will cost fans an average of about £870.
Panini, which first produced a World Cup sticker album for the 1970 tournament in Mexico, has priced five-sticker packs for the Qatar 2022 album at 90p each. That is a 12.5% increase on the 80p cost of a five-sticker pack for the Russia 2018 album. For Euro 2016 a pack cost 50p.
There are a total of 670 Qatar 2022 stickers, which first went on sale last Thursday, to collect. However, because of duplicates, fans would – on average – need to buy 4,832 stickers to complete the album, according to calculations by Paul Harper, a mathematics professor at Cardiff University.
At 18p a sticker that works out at £870. The total average cost has increased from £770 in 2018 (when there were more stickers in the album).
Harper said if fans were “extremely lucky and never had a duplicate” in the packets they bought they would need to buy a minimum of 137 packets to complete the entire book.
That would cost £120.60. A total of 670 stickers in the entire book, with five stickers in each packet and a packet costing 90p: 670/5 = 134 packets x 90p = £120.60.
However, Harper said most people will find they collect many duplicate stickers. He worked out a formula to predict the probability of duplicates. “The first sticker you buy is absolutely guaranteed not to be a duplicate,” he said in his research first posted in 2018. “The second sticker you get has a 681/682 (99.85%) chance of being a new sticker. The third sticker you get has a 680/682 (99.7%) chance of being a new sticker, and so on.”
The probability of finding new stickers when you get close to the end becomes vanishingly
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