This year I am collecting the Panini Official Licensed World Cup sticker album. I first started doing this when I was thirty, having read that if you buy a sealed box you should be guaranteed a set. As I believed at the time that I had enough 'spare liquidity' to afford a box that was what I did. It livened up a World Cup for which England had not qualified. Sadly since then boxes of stickers are 100 packets rather than 200 and, having browsed through an album, I know there are 639 stickers in the set and five stickers per packet. Hence one box, even if devoid of swaps, wouldn't be enough to complete the set.
I bought two boxes and an album from the Co-op in Fore Street, Exeter, largely because in passing it most nights on the way home from work I know that they are used to dealing with lunatics and drunks. The lad on the till had to call for assistance on how to avoid scanning 200 packs one by one, which would've rather pissed off the queue. Total cost £102.99.
I have read in Four Four Two that two Swiss mathematicians who've analysed 12 boxes of stickers from 4 Swiss cities for the 2010 World Cup decided that there was a high probability that there was no such thing as a 'rare sticker'. Their recommendation was to buy one box plus forty packets and swap until you're down to the fifty which you can order from the company. I wish I'd read that before buying two boxes, but then I may not find anybody to swap with.
Having calculated that I have just over three packets for every game, I decide to open, erm, three packets for every game, although this will go up slightly as the tournament progresses. With five free packets with the album and six free stickers in the centre of the album - I checked most of the albums in the Co-op, the six free stickers are all the same - I have 1036 stickers to reveal and 639 to get, so I need 61.7% of the stickers to be non-swaps. I think that's a bit of an ask.
To make things a little more interesting and a little different from other times I have done this I will bet on the result of the game dependent on the number of stickers of each team which I get on each day; I feel I haven't wasted enough money on this already. So I will bet 50 pence on the correct score and 50 pence on the win/ draw market. Yes, I'm that much of a high roller. I also suspect that nearer the end of the tournament I'll be betting on a lot of nil-nils.
Not sure whether I will be able to keep this blog up each day whilst trying to watch the games themselves. Highly doubtful that I'll get the set of stickers and extremely dubious that the betting will make any money whatsoever.
Anyway, here goes.
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