Panini.Stickers, World Cup albums and Adrenalyn XL

The stickers, the cards and the licences

The licence for Panini's World Cup albums runs until 2030, and the sticker guide goes through how the albums began. The football cards, among them Adrenalyn XL, are under football cards. Panini got the NBA licence in 2009, and what happened to it after that is in the basketball guide. Panini's sports card series are compared with those of Topps and Upper Deck in the guide to the card manufacturers.

Ten lire a pack

Panini began in 1960, when the brothers Benito and Giuseppe Panini bought a batch of unsold stickers from a company in Milan and sold them in packs for ten lire. The company was founded in Modena and sold 15 million packs in its very first year. Panini's first collection, Calciatori from 1961, had the Swede Nils Liedholm of Milan on the album cover. Umberto Panini, one of the brothers behind the company, designed Fifimatic, a machine that quickly packed the stickers into packs, so that packing could move from people's homes to the factory. Panini's first album with self-adhesive stickers came in 1972/73, and before that collectors had to stick the pictures in with glue.

Giuseppe Panini's collection of stickers was donated to the municipality of Modena in 1992 and is the basis of the Museo della Figurina museum. Marvel Entertainment Group bought Panini in 1994, and in 1999 the company returned to Italian ownership. Adrenalyn XL came in 2009, the same year Panini entered American sports cards by buying Donruss Playoff in Texas, which became Panini America.