Twenty years ago, before Raheem Sterling was toilet trained and John Wark hipster moustaches had come back in fashion, the craze of Premier League stickers swept through playgrounds up and down the country.
Whereas kids nowadays obsess over fine-tuning their FIFA ultimate team, back then it was a mission to complete your sticker collection before the end of the season. Most of us came up short, but many important lessons were learned…
Our fine motor skills were honed
At a time when most of us couldn’t even write or hold a knife and fork, placing a sticker inside a box of identical size represented a huge challenge.
When your sticker made the slightest contact with the page, you were at a point of no return – trying to reposition it brought about a very real possibility that you could rip your book and destroy its pristine condition.
Living with the shame of a slightly misplaced sticker was the lesser of two evils. And as if all this wasn’t tough enough, you then had to navigate the complexity of those bastard half-and-half stickers…
We learned to dislike football players for no valid reason
During our innocent primary school years, many of us were unfamiliar with the tribal nature of football. The idea of truly disliking someone (let alone hating someone) simply because they played for a particular team was something none of us could fully understand.
But, as the season ticked by, certain faces seemed to appear in every other packet of stickers. As a result, resentment towards them grew, regardless of what they actually did on the pitch. To this day, I still can’t stand the sight of John Salako’s smug face whenever it appears on a television screen.
The minefield of swaps
Swapping stickers was a serious business. Somehow, someone, somewhere decided that a ‘shiny’ could fetch two normal stickers in return and everyone accepted it.
Verbal agreements counted for nothing in this environment and the deceipt felt when one of your ‘friends’ decided against giving you a Wimbledon kit shiny for Ian Woan and Andy Impey, in favour of making a deal with someone else, was a primary school equivalent of them sleeping with your wife.
We discovered that some kids were just plain weird
During a heated swapping session, my eyes would often wander to other parts of the school yard. To those kids that I knew collected stickers but, for some reason, decided to distance themselves from trading.
In time I learned of their peculiar alternatives to joining in with the brilliantly disorganised madness of the playtime swap shop.
Some would plaster their swaps over any of their possessions – lunch boxes, usually. Others decided to stick their duplicates over the original sticker, which made that particular part of the page stand out significantly more.
One lad I knew had Richard Edghill seventeen times. By the time you reached Manchester City’s page in his album, Mount Edghill towered above the likes of Terry Phelan and Michael Vonk.
Our sticker collecting prepared us for supporting a team as adults
The emotions we felt throughout the different stages of the sticker collecting season are very similar to the feelings we experience when we follow a team over the course of a football season.
At the start, everyone is optimistic and looking forward to what lies ahead. No matter how much the odds were stacked against you, you believed that you would fill every gap in your album. Now adults, this mirrors the optimism we feel about our teams on the first day of every single season.
As May approached, the realisation dawned on us that our chances of completing the album were fading. Sure, you were only one Chris Kiwomya away from completing Ipswich Town, but you still needed eight more from Southampton, Blackburn Rovers were nowhere near finished, and you still craved that sacred Premier League badge shiny.
Similarly, nowadays, as the end of the season approaches, we can become demoralised and despondent about the plight of our football team.
Regardless of this, when one season ended the cycle began again – you bought a new album, you started collecting again. Exactly the same as we do with our teams now – what happened last season doesn’t matter, this year will be our year.
