Every time one of these Panini football sticker books came out it was a must have for me, even though I never actually completed any of them, or even get close enough to send off a postal order to the address in the back of the book for the final missing few. Any kid at school who did complete a whole sticker book immediately took on legendary status although these were mainly the kids with the rich dads. Whichever book I was trying in vain to complete at the time (Football 79, 80, 81, 82, Europa 80 etc.) my dad would buy me 2 or 3 packets of stickers on a Friday night and I might have talked my mum into buying me a packet during the week. Obviously, at this rate trying to collect all 427 different stickers in packets of 4 would have meant collecting until 1985 by which time that book was long abandoned along with several others. A new packet would be a very exciting affair. Tearing off the top, pulling the stickers out and running through the ritual "Got, Got, Got, NEED IT!!!". I can remember that getting one of the shiny team badges felt like a real bonus. These 'gots' would then of course be up for 'swaps' where you would meet up with friends in the playground and all would pull huge bundles of stickers from their snorkel hood Parker coats. The stickers would then be flicked though at a rapid pace accompanied by the usual "Got, Got, Got, Got, Got, NEED IT!!!". The album had 48 pages of which the opening 4 were the group tables (with spaces to write the results in). The opening stickers were the main 'logos' along with a sticker of the World Cup itself. Then, 31 stickers depicted the different stadiums along with a promotional poster for that stadium, some of which are strangely avant-gard now so I don't know what I made of them at the time. The teams are then laid out in their group order starting with Italy. The main teams of the tournament had a sticker for each player, whilst the minnows (Cameroon, Algeria, El Salvador, Kuwait, New Zealand) had to be content with 2 players sharing a sticker. Each team also had its shiny badge sticker and the team photo. Getting hold of a completed sticker book from Ebay now will cost around £30 depending on the condition, but I can heartily recommend a book produced by Panini in Italy called 'Il Grande Album Dei Mondiali Di Calcio' which has reprints of all the Panini World Cup sticker books from 1970 to 2002. The introduction text is only in Italian but the books themselves are their usual multilingual selves. They're not massively easy to get hold of, but I found a copy on Ebay for less than £10 and it is an absolute treat!