Time To Start Collecting Again
As another football tournament rolls around, the UEFA 2012 European Championships, it’s time to start collecting another set of Panini stickers.
As a kid I collected a few albums over the years including ones for the Back To The Future and Gremlins movies (yes, I’m that old!) but it was the football ones that I enjoyed more than most. I only completed one football album, Football 86. I seem to recall that my Mexico 86 album fell two stickers short.
One of the joys of collecting those stickers as a kid was ‘swapsies’. Quite a few of my friends collected them and we’d get together during play time at school working through each other’s doubles and calling out the ritualistc “Got, got, got, need, got, need…” as we did so.
Even as kids we knew how to barter as well. In Football 86 the club badges were foil ones and for some reason they were worth double. I don’t know who made that one up! And if you got to the stage where you only needed a handful to finish the book, your mates would try and stitch you up and get 3 or 4 stickers off you for that one! Gits!
But as an adult it’s frowned upon if you walk into a playground with a handful of stickers and try to talk to kids. So in this digital world it’s good that there are websites dedicated to swapping stickers, match cards and the like with people all over the country (and the world if you want to pay that much for postage!).
The best one I’ve found is Swapstick.com. It’s by no means the prettiest site (stupid Lotus Notes) but it does it’s job well. You sign in, add the album your collecting for and then put in 2 lists of stickers. The first is the ones that you still need to complete the album and the second is a list of all the doubles that you have.
You are then presented with a list of people collecting the same album who either have stickers you need, stickers you’ve got that they need or both. Ping them an email via the site to inititiate the swapping process. It’s very simple.
I used the site a couple of years ago when collecting the 2010 South Africa World Cup album and it helped me complete it with ease, so hopefully it’ll do the job this time around as well.
