They have already come as gifts in candies, chewing gum, snacks and even cigarette packs. There were promotions in which special stickers could be exchanged for prizes such as bicycles and fountain pens — editions were also launched in which the difficult task of completing the album entitled one to a special reward. In the year of the World Cup, it is difficult to stay away from the world of collecting stickers with the players and the emblems of the teams competing in the biggest championship in world football.
With an eye on this thread, journalist and writer Marcelo Duarte —a curious professional recognized as the author of the now classic book-almanac “O Guia dos Curiosos”— has just launched “O Álbum dos Álbuns de Figurinhas das Copas”, an emotional rescue that brings stories from all the collections of World Cup stickers that circulated in Brazil.
The project started about a year and a half ago. Duarte, himself a sticker collector since the 1970 World Cup, when he was five or six years old, had the help of five major sports album collectors. “I did some research and saw that there were no books on this topic in the entire world.”
One of these collectors is retired physical education teacher Antônio Fiaschi Teixeira, 71. He admits that he has no idea how many albums he accumulates. His favorites are those from the 1960s. “It was a strong time for the release of several albums that became iconic,” he said. “I really enjoy learning about the history of football, the clubs and the players.”
Professor at Fundação Getúlio Vargas and retired judge at the São Paulo Court of Justice, Moacir Andrade Peres, 72, was another source of Duarte’s research. “I collected football cards in my childhood and adolescence. The albums were lost over time. The recovery occurred at the end of the 1990s, firstly, with nostalgic intentions and, later, as a way of preserving football memory”, he said, who keeps around 3,000 copies, considering the duplicates.
For Peres, more than the history of football, this recovery helps to show the “evolution of Brazilian graphic design”. Together with friends, he is part of Memofut (Football Literature and Memory Group), which meets monthly at the Football Museum, in São Paulo.
Cigarettes and prizes
The first World Cup stickers in Brazil appeared at the time of the second edition of the championship, in 1934. The collection was called “Team Brasileiro Internacional” and was a promotion for the Vênus candies. In the following World Cup, in 1938, a similar initiative was promoted by the Sudan cigarette factories. A star of the national team at the time, the player Leônidas da Silva (1913-2004) —who would become top scorer in that year’s tournament— signed a contract with the brand and had his name and portrait printed on the product’s packaging.
But, although they generated a mobilization among fans, these initiatives still did not result in albums: they were collections of individual stickers. The first World Cup booklets with space for stickers to be pasted appeared in 1950. The pioneering spirit belongs to the Football Bullets, with the iconic “Stars of the 1950 World Football Championship”. “Interestingly, it was launched after the World Cup,” noted Duarte. So, there was already information that Brazil had lost the final to Uruguay.
In a world where information came much more via radio, the curiosity to see images of the World Cup explains the success of an album subsequent to the event. So much so that, in addition to the stickers with photos of the players, there were also scenes of goals and iconic moves from the competition.
These late albums continued to be made. The São Paulo publisher Aquarela, for example, would release the album “Brasil Campeão Mundial de Futebol 1958” at the end of that decade, with photos of the entire Brazilian squad that had become world champions for the first time.
From the second half of the 1950s onwards, there were several publications alluding to football and the World Cup — very different from the current situation, provided by greater control of image rights and million-dollar commercial contracts, such as the one that guarantees Panini exclusivity. There were publication titles such as “Album of the History and Development of Sports”, “TV Bóll”, “Album Esportivo Quigol” and “Collection Pé de Ouro”.
Albums linked to competitions became increasingly common, with the promise of prizes for those who completed the entire collection, such as toys and blenders. To make the task more difficult, publishers printed a smaller number of specific stickers — they were stamped stickers, rare and highly sought after.
In 1971, a federal law banned the trick. Since then, by law, all stickers have to be printed in the same quantity.
Official jingoism
Marcelo Duarte’s first contact with an album was during the 1970 World Cup. He suspects that the hobby was more his father’s than his own, because the then little boy was forbidden from trying to glue the stickers together, so that everything would be right. It was a time when stickers weren’t stickers. They needed to be fixed with glue — and the journalist’s father used gum arabic.
His passion for the world of albums increased in Duarte’s life when he read, as a child, the book “O Gênio do Crime”, a children’s best-seller written by João Carlos Marinho (1935-2019) and published for the first time in 1969. In a mix of reference and homage to the work, Marcelo Duarte himself wrote a children’s book called “O Mistério da Figurinha Dourada”, released in 2018.
In the 1970s, as the book recalls, the dictatorship’s jingoistic atmosphere was mixed into the albums, which also featured inscriptions of regime slogans such as “No one holds this country” and “Brazil: love it or leave it”, pages dedicated to the Armed Forces, photos of federal authorities with players and even phrases such as “Collaborate with our government”.
Hegemony
The current scenario came with the professionalization of the market. Created in 1961 in Italy, the publisher Panini released its first album in 1970, still in Europe, and arrived in Brazil in 1989, forming a partnership with the publisher Abril — in this format, the 1990 and 1994 albums were released. In 1998, the giant Italian brand became the sole holder of the rights to publish the official World Cup albums in Brazil.
A curiosity brought up by Duarte’s book answers a recurring question among collectors of World Cup stickers: who is the player who appears volleying on the cover of Panini albums? This is Carlo Parola (1921-2000), a defender who was part of the Italian team that played in the 1950 World Cup. The image was created from a photograph taken by photojournalist Corrado Banchi (1912-1999), who covered the Juventus x Fiorentina match on January 15, 1950 for the newspaper Calcio Illustrato.
