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World Cup stickers 2026
2026-05-02
The men's World Cup is coming up, so it's time to work out the cost of filling the official Panini sticker book again.
Panini are boasting that this year's sticker book contains more stickers than ever, which can only mean one thing: you're going to have to buy more stickers than ever.
But how much more than last time is completing this sticker book going to cost you?
Buying stickers
This year, you can buy:
- A starter pack that includes a sticker book with 6 stickers (that are always the same and hence guaranteed to contain no duplicates) and 4 packs of 7 random stickers. This costs £4.99.
- Packs of 7 random stickers. Various sources claim these are £1.25 each, although our local Morrison's is selling them for £2.
- Multipacks of 6 or 8 packs of 7 random stickers. Both these multipacks work out at £1.25 per pack.
- Multipacks of stickers that come with a nice metal box to keep your swaps in (you'll need a few of these if you're planning to complete your collection). These are releasing later than the rest of the collection, but look like they'll work out at £1.25 per pack plus £1 for the metal box.
For the rest of this blog post, we'll assume that all
stickers are bought in multipacks.
![](javascript:showlimage("panini2026-1.jpg"))
![](javascript:showlimage("panini2026-2.jpg"))
Every album includes Declan Rice (England), Heechan Hwang (South Korea), Alexis Vega (Mexico), Mikel Merino (Spain), Danley Jean Jacques (Haiti) and Nicolas Jackon (Sengal)
How many stickers will I need?
After you've stuck your first 6 stickers in, you need to collect 974 more stickers.
Following the same method as I did in 2018, we can work out that if you want to get all of these from packs of random stickers, then
you should expect to buy 7265 stickers (including the 4 packs in your starter pack). Including the cost of the starter pack, buying all these stickers will cost
£1297.35.
But as always, you don't have to spend this much, as Panini let you order the last \(n\) stickers (for any value of \(n\) that you choose, although I have strong memories
of \(n\) being 50 when we had to send off paper sticker ordering forms when I was at school). On the Panini website, they're selling missing stickers
for 45p per sticker*.
If you decide to order the last 50 stickers, then you should expect to buy 2883 stickers to get the rest of the stickers before ordering the last 50. In total this will
cost you £532.81. That's a big saving.
What is the best number of stickers to order?
If you want to minimise the amount that you have to spend to complete this sticker book, you should choose your value of \(n\) wisely. This plot shows the expected total cost
of completing the sticker book if you decide on different numbers of stickers to order:
![](javascript:showlimage("wc2026plot-updated.png"))
The lowest expected cost is achieved when ordering 386 stickers: £334.54. That's an even bigger saving, although 386 does feel to me like an unreasonably large value for \(n\).
Swapping
As always, the cheapest way to complete the sticker book is to convince more of your friends to collect too so that you can swap your duplicate stickers with them. You could get
the price down as low as £174.99 if you manage to swap every single duplicate that you get.
If you decide to set \(n\) to 0, there's a good chance that going out now and buying 200 starter packs for £998 to give to your friends make them start collecting will mean spending less money in total
than trying to complete your sticker book on your own...
Edit: The first version of this blog post guessed that the missing stickers would cost 36p each, as this was the cost for other recent collections. The numbers have been updated to match
the 45p that Panini are actually charging. The original lowest cost based on 36p was ordering 483 stickers to give a total cost of £295.78.
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