Only Good Stickers: Panini Fussball 81

lunedì 24 ottobre 2022

Panini Fussball 81

Fussball 81 is the third Panini album of the German football. The collection includes all the Bundesliga clubs and the Second Liga (only club badges) for the season 1980/81. The album features also a large section about the European cups with team photo stickers of the competing clubs, and many other sections with stickers.

The album begins with the contents and an introductory page including three metallic stickers (Federation logo, Bundesliga and DFB-Pokal trophies) and a puzzle composed by 9 stickers with the map of Germany and the locations of the Bundesliga clubs on the map. Then, the 18 Bundesliga clubs are shown in alphabetical order with 20 stickers over two pages for each club: the metallic club badge, the team photo (composed by four stickers) and 15 players.

In the central pages of the album there are some special sections. A large drawing realized by the cartoonist Prosdocimi depicts a crazy game to be completed with 20 stickers. In the pages behind, photos of the Bundesliga fans are shown to be filled with 18 stickers (one per club). The album features also two pages with stickers of the trainers, managers, referees, Germans abroad, and other prominent Bundesliga players. For these two pages there are in total 36 half-size stickers (18 regular stickers).

After the last Bundesliga club, the album resumes with the Second Liga, divided in the North (22 clubs) and in the South (20 clubs) groups. The stickers of this section are a large map of the Second Liga with the club locations (9 stickers) and one badge sticker per club.

In the last part, the album focuses on the European competitions of the 1980/81 season: European Cup, Cup Winners' Cup, and UEFA Cup. Here we find the metallic stickers of the three trophies and the team photo stickers of all of the teams that reached the quarterfinals, except for the German clubs (Bayern Munchen and Foruna Dusseldorf) that are just printed in the album. Liverpool is the only team photo composed by two stickers, whereas the other team photos are individual stickers. This collection includes, therefore, the team photo stickers of some historical football clubs (Liverpool, Inter, Feyenoord, Benfica, Real Madrid, etc.). There are in total 25 stickers in this European section. The collection features also 24 stickers with the players of the German national team. Those are extra stickers that are not part of the album.

In the season 1980/81, Bayern Munchen won the Bundesliga with the top goalscorer of the tournament Karl-Heinz Rumenigge (29 goals). In the European Cup, Liverpool defetaed Real Madrid in the final (1-0), whereas Dinamo Tbilisi won the Cup Winners' Cup (2-1 against Carl Zeiss Jena) and Ipswich Town the Uefa Cup.