Panini Championship stickers are cool and collectable

Great news for fans of Championship clubs – the new Panini sticker collection, Championship 2011 is now on sale.
I suppose we should be really grateful that Panini, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year bothers to take an annual look at life in the second tier and I for one am thrilled.
It’s only the last couple of years that we’ve had Panini sticker collections for the Championship – so what’s this year’s like?
Well all 24 clubs are featured, they get a page each in the album which each follows the same pattern. There’s the shiny club badge, the home and away kit and a team sticker, plus the team captain which is consists of two parts (I got Paul McKenna’s legs in my first packet!). There are stickers for two star players and 16 featured players from each team, which are split in two like the old Scottish stickers in the Panini albums of the mid-1980s.
That’s the only real shame – that each sticker doesn’t contain one player, but with 386 in total that may be a good thing as full size stickers would mean they’d need to be nearer 600 to feature all the players contained in this collection.
The stickers are 50p a packet which seems a lot these days, but that’s about a sixth the price of a programme and 25 years ago that was still the same ratio when stickers were around 10p a packet.
As well as the 24 clubs, there are stickers for the league trophy, a special Panini anniversary sticker and 24 international stars (one for each club), which gets a little tenuous at times – Owen Garvan is Ipswich’s (0 caps), David Somma is Leeds’ (0 caps) and Watford’s is Scott Loach (0 caps).
Still, it’s a cracking collection and one that any fan of a Championship club will no doubt treasure.