Only Good Stickers: Panini Football 2003 (UK)

venerdì 10 febbraio 2023

Panini Football 2003 (UK)

In the season 2002/2003, Topps owned the official rights of the Premier League and published the usual Merlin's Premier League album. Panini decided to produce an unofficial sticker album of the tournament, called Panini's Football 2003, but they were forced to remove the collection from the shelves due to the lack of rights. For this reason, the album Football 2003 became immediately very rare. It is nowadays hard to find an incomplete album or even individual stickers. I have the pleasure to share here a Football 2003 album, complete with all the stickers inside.

The collection features all the Premier League clubs and a large section with the main International football stars. The album starts with the contents and an introductory pages including three stickers of players in action: Thierry Henry, Ronaldo, and Rio Ferdinand. The Premier League clubs are then shown in alphabetical order. Six clubs have 22 stickers over four pages, whereas the remaining clubs only 12 stickers on two pages. The six clubs with more stickers are Arsenal, Chelsea, Leeds United, Liverpool, Manchester United, and Newcastle. All of the player stickers are taken in action and in some cases not even with the club shirt, but with the national team kit. Some player stickers are shiny (three for the clubs with more stickers and one for the others) and the clubs with 22 stickers have also one large size sticker, also depicting one player in action.

In the center of the album there is a large section of 10 pages and 75 stickers with the "World Superstars", featuring some of the best players in the world. Those are also action stickers, some shiny and some large size stickers. Among those players we can mention Ronaldo, Luis Enrique, Thuram, Buffon, Batistuta, Totti, Raul, Rivaldo, Beckham, Vieri, Nesta, Figo, Zidane, Trezeguet, Ronaldinho, Ballack, Zanetti, Del Piero, Roberto Carlos.

The last page of the album features six super strikers that scored lot of goals in the previous season. This section is called "Hotshots" and it includes six shiny stickers in action: Henry, Van Nistelrooy, Hasselbaink, Shearer, Owen, and Solskjaer. There are also instructions on how to order the missing stickers, something that eventually became impossible. Football 2003 is then an experiment that did not work and left a niche product for demanding collectors.