“Entire boxes are bought, there is a lack of product and we are producing 24 hours a day”

“I’m the typical nostalgic millennial, I admit that.”

This is how our colleague Laura Sacristán of Xataka Mobile the article in which he narrates his experience completing the World Cup sticker album… digitally. It is a phrase that could summarize the entire text that is to come.

And if one feels like Don Quixote in front of the windmills when trying to complete the Panini World Cup album. The one that the company has launched with the punctuality of someone who knows they have a good business on their hands.

Among the strength of the world fifespeculation and the feeling of nostalgia, one buys the album assuming that it will be almost impossible to complete it.

Working piecework

But it doesn’t seem enough.

“It had never started this way, especially in Spain and Portugal. In Brazil it has always been crazy, but, this year, there is a lack of product and we are producing 24 hours a day. We did not expect it”

The statements are from Lluís Torrent, general director of Panini in Spain, to elDiario.eswho accepts that there is a shortage of stock in the stickers that our country demands. And the company claims that it had not seen the same fever for World Cup cards in our country as this year. Although the public is loyal to each year’s album, the World Cups have something special and that can also be seen in the results account by adding more followers.

“There are adults who have reengaged. There is hunger and whole boxes are bought“, explains Torrent to the digital media. And our colleague confirms it. If she has made the leap to digital it is for a very simple reason: desperation. “They are sold out everywhere” is the answer she has heard the most in recent days. Fed up, she has forgotten the physical card.

“The cards also serve as a socialization tool, you have to know how to organize them, exchange them, “They have a positive aspect of coexistence and sociability,” says Torrent. The problem is when the speculator takes over that “positive aspect of coexistence and sociability.”

To both Laura Sacristán, Torrent, and everyone who approaches a kiosk, those who run them give the same answer: “people take away whole boxes.” The shortage remains in the market three weeks after this report from The Newspaper. The person who spoke then was Narayan, head of a kiosk in Sant Cugat del Vallés, stating that even they themselves have had larger orders rejected for their points of sale.

More than 600 kilometers further away, in the Puerta Cerrada square in the heart of Madrid, another kiosk gives the same answer to some children who are trying to quench their thirst for stickers. Children who can go look for the ones that interest them most just a few hundred meters away. In the lower part of the Rastro, the fans They meet every Sunday to exchange the repeated stickers and complete the collection.

Or buy them.

Because the truth is that there is no shortage of those who resell the most sought-after stickers. On digital buying and selling portals it is not difficult to find individual trading cards for 30 euros (the equivalent of 20 sealed envelopes). if we talk about Cristiano Ronaldo either Messi. For an “extra sticker”, the stickers premium that Panini has launched along with the standard collection with another 80 prints, individual prices start at 50 euros and in some they reach 150 euros.

Despite everything, Torrent defends that there is the same probability of an envelope containing the Lamine Yamal sticker as it is of JK Duverne, the Haitian defender who plays for the Belgian team KAA Gent. This World Cup, furthermore, is of special interest for collectors because everything indicates, if no one can remedy it, that it will be the last for Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar.

But also, the collection is broader than ever because more teams than ever play in the World Cup. The result: 980 cards that represent the players of the 48 teams that complete the tournament this time.

A figure never seen in Panini’s World Cup album and that falls like May water on the Italian company that this year will bill more than 100 million euros in Spain. A tiny part of the global result that is estimated at 1,400 million euros in this edition, they point out in Seville newspaper.

An empire built on two factories, one in Italy and the other in Brazil.

An empire built on childhood anxiety, hunger accumulated during the four years of the World Cup cycle and, above all, the nostalgic thirst that seems insatiable among the millennial generation.

Photo | Panini and FIFA

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