Cost of filling your Panini World Cup sticker album estimated at ‘over £700’

Got, got, need...

With a World Cup on the horizon, this is an exciting time for football fans. And what better way to channel such excitement than focusing all your efforts on collecting stickers of the players set to feature at this summer's tournament? Yep, attempting to fill Panini's World Cup sticker album has become something of a tradition for fans in the lead up to the tournaments - be it primary school kids or fully grown adults who really should know better. One point that often gets overlooked by those who become completely fixated with completing the collection is that is costs actual real life money to do so. Lots of it, too, if you listen to an estimate given  by maths expert Prof Paul Harper, from Cardiff University's School of Mathematics. As highlighted by the BBC, he estimates it will cost £773.60 to fill the album - double the cost of the Euro 2016 collection two years ago. The fact there are more stickers to collect - 682 - partly explains this, as does the increase in cost: a pack of five stickers will now set you back 80p, not 50p. Prof Harper calculated a formula to include the least probable number of duplicate stickers, eventually demonstrating that on average, someone hoping to fill the album would need to buy 967 packets - a whopping 4,832 stickers. Of course, it might not cost you quite so much. As he points out, it's possible to do it for £109.60, but this would involve buying 137 packets without getting a single duplicate. Obviously, that's very, very, very unlikely.