Football stickers craze hits Brazil
What ever the Europeans might claim, South America is the true home of football where the craze of the game is as big as the passion for life. The religion in the region is football, hence the talent that flows through the ranks of powerhouses like Brazil the four time world champions, and Argentina winners of the tournament twice.
With the World cup in South Africa now less than a month away, the craze and passion for the national team are touching its zenith in Brazil with people talking about football and football alone. Besides the passion for their team millions of avid Brazilian football fans of all ages, status and school of thought are struggling to complete their Panini World Cup albums after a sticker rush emptied stocks in newsstands across the country.
The boom in the sales of the 2010 album of the stickers that are immensely popular in the country soared to unexpected levels prompting the maker Panini to double sticker production in relation to the 2006 edition to 22.5 million units a day. The massive 72-page album is made up of 640 stickers, including 40 glittery ones. The catch is that some of the tickets are harder to find than others, especially the top players of leading tournament contenders like Brazil, Italy, Argentina and England. The difficulty to find certain stickers has even opened way for a "black market".
The craze for the stickers soar every time a world cup approaches as has been the case since 1950 when the series was first introduced. Panini's World Cup album has gained tremendous popularity around the world, even hitting markets of the countries not competing in the event. Brazil is one of the most popular around the world and is expected to be the top-selling country this year, after tracking Germany in 2006. The company also estimates record sales for 2010, topping the last tournament's record of 1 billion packets worldwide.
Since the beginning of April, when the album was released in Brazil, roughly 2 million units were sold and an extra 3 million were distributed for free. The album craze grew so big that collectors had to come up with the idea of organizing online groups to schedule meetings for swapping stickers in several cities. Now, in classrooms across Brazil, children and youths stay in after the bell to exchange "players" with their friends. The craze does not engulf school going kids alone, twenty-five-year-old journalism student Marcelo Abreu, takes his album to college every day. He said collecting World Cup stickers has become a hobby.
"Completing the World Cup album collection has become a habit. Since 1998, I collect every sticker album," he said, after swapping stickers with classmates.
Swapping spots are often located near informal dealers, who trade, buy and sell stickers for a slightly higher price saving time for eager collectors, and that is where they make their money. Dealer Marcos Azeredo said his sales were soaring. "I don't have any control, I can't control (sales) because I can't even organize the stickers I swap and the ones I sell. But I sell around 1,000 to 1,500 stickers a day," he said. The flip side is that the albums have raised threats of thefts, and robbers are on the look out of the albums and the money that they can make by black-marketing them.
But for most Brazilians like Physiotherapist Fernanda de Almeida, who is collecting with her husband, the collection of the stickers is more than a hobby, which has nothing sinister about it. "Now there are 20 (stickers) missing for me to complete (the album). So, we - my husband and I, we are collecting the album together -- came here to swap. He said he has already swapped over 100 stickers today, including some that we already had, so we can help other people too," she said.
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