Panini fever hits Switzerland
The little Panini football stickers have arrived, and for the Italian company that produces them the next couple of months promise lucrative trade.
Panini fever strikes every two years – for the World or European football championships – when players’ mugshots sell like hot cakes. The company hopes to sell 65 million packets in Switzerland – more per head than any other market.
But the phenomenon is not restricted to primary school playgrounds. According to a study, 85 per cent of “infected” people are 15 or older.
“Switzerland is our biggest customer,” Panini’s Switzerland manager Silvia Losi said from her office in Modena, Italy.
“We sold 60 million packets [each with five stickers of players or teams] in Switzerland during the 2006 World Cup. That means eight per inhabitant. By comparison, Germany lies in second place with 110 million packets, two per inhabitant.”
Panini is convinced it will strike it rich during the Euro 2008, co-hosted by Switzerland and Austria in June. Last week it presented an exclusive edition for the Swiss market.
“This special edition is a reward for our Swiss customers,” Losi said. “We haven’t done this for any other country, not even for Austria. The album and pictures in the Swiss edition are different from all others. This edition is larger and has 555 stickers.”
She added: “In addition to the usual 20 portraits, the Swiss get an additional 20 of the players in action and in public. These also include the support staff, the mascots Trix and Flix, the stadiums and cities.”
Making the cut
One of Panini’s biggest challenges is selecting the 20 players who will appear in the album. This is because no coach will name his 23-man squad before the albums are released.
“We have a special team who make educated guesses,” Losi revealed. “We analyse the statistics of the competitive and friendly games. If in doubt, we send our lists to the country’s football federation to see if we are on the right course. For this reason our error rate is very small.”
The case of Jens Lehmann however was an exception. The German national goalkeeper did not figure in Panini’s selection of 2006 World Cup players despite being first choice keeper for his country. Panini thought his compatriot Oliver Kahn would get the number one jersey.
“Afterwards we had to do a special edition with [Lehmann’s] portrait and information. Collectors could then stick in his portrait in place of another German player,” Losi said.
With an increasing number of editions, Panini has become an institution to which even newspapers refer. Before the 1998 World Cup in France, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera commented on Panini’s decision not to select Italian star Roberto Baggio before the coach had made a decision. Baggio played.
Some people even gossip that coaches wait until the Panini album is out before they publish their final squad list. Could Swiss coach Köbi Kuhn also be flicking through his Panini album?
swissinfo and Pascal Dupasquier, La Liberté newspaper
Panini sales figures keep rising – and so does their price. This year, packets of five stickers cost one franc, 10 per cent more than in 2006.
Taking into account swaps, Panini calculates an album will cost SFr150 to fill.
A rumour has circulated for years that some stickers are rarer than others. However Losi said an identical number of all stickers are printed. They are then mixed into packets randomly.
Panini’s stickers are a global industry and the company is the fourth-largest publisher of children’s books and the Italian market leader in comics.
In 2006 the group had a SFr926 million turnover and is present in 110 countries with 705 staff.
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