Zeitgeist Panini

Preserve of any nostalgic bloke chat, footy show, or stand-up, Panini’s ubiquity for boys of a certain age almost certainly kept kids interested through the dark days of English football and were arguably the bedrock for Murdoch’s empire.

The got-got-got-got-got-got-neeeeeeed aspect of Panini is well documented and mused over. However, the books themselves are quite a document of the evolution of how the game was perceived and covered. A fairly small sample of books shows the rise of football as an industry, a performance and how it evolved into marketeers wet dream.

From the fairly amateur and bland efforts of the late 70s, these books evolved swiftly in to a more professional beast by the mid 80s. The single driving factor of this appears to be ‘Big’ Ron Atkinson. I’m exaggerating of course but if you look at these historical documents over the course of five years, Ron is an obvious figurehead of the glamourisation and commodification of English football.

I’ve got six Panini sticker books here, 1980 through to 1985, some complete, some not quite. There’s also an interloper of Soccer ’79, which is such a wreck I have no idea who produced it.

The books themselves had always featured an action shot on the front cover, an ad somewhere on the back pages but throughout the early 80s there was, increasingly, a section that wasn’t just a factual document of who played for whom but an acknowledgement of football as culture and commmodity. In ’81 there was focus on the previous season’s ‘Cockney Cup Final’, in ’83 it was the laws of the game with illustrative stickers and by ’84 it was art.

The ’79 interloper and the ’80 Panini books are pretty bland. The pages are a faded white and the pictures on the ’79 stickers look brilliantly dated – simple busts of players in mostly regulation plain or collared shirts. The Panini one has a great ad for the Simon Sturridge official league football, the one with the orange hexagons. Cool now but these days the ads are probably for Haribo.

There were a few cutting edge ’79 kits but the 1980 ones are really in a style flux. Coventry City exemplified the stylised new kit, the vertical parallel navy and white stripes down each side, while Arsenal’s plain red with white sleeves kept to tradition. By ’81 footy kit was en vogue, much like facial hair and perms, and, like Starksy & Hutch’s iconic car, the focus was very much on the very cool stripe.

As well as Coventry, Palace had the red and blue diagonal, Leeds, Spurs and Norwich had the Admiral sleeve stripe, Southampton had the two fat red verticals with thinner side verticals, Cardiff had yellow and white bar stripe down the left side, Luton had a similar fat orange/thin black affair, Orient had a thin version of Southampton’s and West Ham had a series of claret and blue stripes in a shallow ‘V’ shape across the chest. Stripes ruled.

In 1980, Ron was an ebullient, slightly orange-faced tracksuit manager. By 81 he was suited and by 83 it was the sophistication of cream slip-ons and a silver suit. The irony, of course, is that during this time he’d evolved from track suit success at WBA into the more glamorous but troubled Man Utd years of style over substance.

The ’81 book upped the style ante, the plain team pages embellished with some trendy colour fades creating margins between players. A bigger 2-sticker team photo was introduced so it wasn’t just a tiny blur of players. There was a new section celebrating the marketable footballer of the year, along with a massive 4-sticker West Ham Cup winning celebration photo.

The beard was creeping in to consciousness in 81, favoured by Villa’s Dennis Mortimer, Brom’s Regis and Coventry’s Dutchman Roger Van Gool. But the muzzy was still king, Souness and Terry Mac’s were bigger and more extrovert than the previous year. Stripes were still de rigeur but the brand new style creeping in was the plainer appearance combined with a shiny fabric, almost mirroring Atkinson’s suits.

Ipswich and Birmingham had plain navy, shiny, Adidas 3-stripes, Man C had light blue Umbro shiny and Spurs ditched the Admiral sleeve stripes and went for a plain white shiny top. An aesthete might suggest it was the style of the era but the cynical will point to shirt sponsorship and the need for a plainer shirt to be the canvas for whatever product was to be emblazoned on the front. Sponsorship was a thorny issue, the bigger clubs had dabbled but they were boycotted by the TV companies.

The focus of the sticker books was changing too. By ’81 gone were the half size Div 2 players, the lower league players marginalised to make more space for the big boys. This year the English 3rd Division and Scottish 2nd tier did put in an appearance with single sticker team shots but it appeared either a sop or a cynical plan to have more stickers so kids would have to buy more to get the golden superstars. It was also probably the only time Stirling Albion ever graced a Panini book.

My ’82 book is a little worse for wear, it’s dog eared and awash with integral sellotape. It is, however, the first one where you can see the effect of sponsorship. Around half the team shots feature their new sponsored kit, several are now iconic shirts. Ipswich’s Pioneer, Arsenal’s JVC and Stoke’s Ricoh to name but three.

By ’83 though, things had really changed. Shirt sponsorship was now allowed and the sticker book had a revamp, got all corporate and switched to a different sticker size, which was long and thin rather than squarish. This meant out with the bust shots and in with full length individual photos so you could see the full shirt and sponsor’s name, rather than just the badge. Very wide angle team shots came in and a wide foil sticker was introduced that included the badge and a cartoon interpretation of the team’s nickname. It created a personality for the teams, which was mostly either hackneyed or ludicrous and here lied amusement.

Along with first influx of external money that sponsorship bought came the new full length glamorous Big Ron, resplendent in silver suit and cream shoes. This guy was schmooooove. And rich. However, someone at the FA was clearly threatened by the influence this new money might have.

The first page of the ’83 book was now stamped with the foil stickers of the badges of the FA, SFA, PFA and SPFA. Another new feature in the ’83 book was a HUGE 7 page section at the back dedicated to THE LAWS OF THE GAME. It was as if someone at the FA or PFA was saying ‘we still run this show’. The laws were illustrated by cartoons that were also stickers and they had motion lines and cartoon stars for collision impacts. It could only have been more Grange Hill if a forked sausage had entered shot and smashed the goalie in the face.

This ’83 book showed who Ron was taking with him. It was the first to make clear who were the tracksuit managers and the photos differentiated them from the sharp suits of United’s Ron, Spurs’ Keith Burkinshaw and Forest’s Clough, the latter perhaps surprisingly, given his penchant for the green sweatshirt that was to appear in just a few years time.

These three were 1983’s vanguard of glamour. But they were managing the big teams, the rich teams, the successful teams. Liverpool were the big boys of course but their manager would have none of that flash stuff, even though the team itself were the first top flight side to usher in this new monied era of sponsored kit.

Sure, there were well turned out players and managers before Big Ron and there were obvious glamour players like Best & Marsh much earlier. But these guys were the exception, they were not indicative of a sea change in English football. They were one off mavericks, Ron and his peers were blazing the trail that the rest would follow.

In 1984 the Panini book, as well as the League itself, joined in with the teams’ headlong plunge into the corporate world. People say Sky changed football but the advent of sponsorship was the start of it. The teams knew they could get more revenue for sponsorship and they fought the FA and the TV companies to get it on telly.

Like the league’s, the ’84 sticker book’s sponsor was Canon. But there is anathema here. The framing for the players went back to the bust shot, the sponsor was wiped from every player photo. The sponsors were in the team photos of course and had some presence in the new iconification of the top scorers. Big Ron was still suave but he was now joined by El Tel. Notice a matey nickname theme here? Most of the English top flight managers held back but the Scottish Premier League went mad for the suit. Half of all managers north of the border were suited, several in very funny shiny suits. They didn’t quite get it, maybe.

While the ’84 and ’85 books appeared to be an FA tool to fight off modernity in the game’s powerbase, it kept going with the modernity of it’s style and design. The gaps where the stickers were to go were at a new jaunty angle, the team pages now featured big sepia tint pictures of the team’s stadium. It arguably began to acknowledge the optimism and capitalism of the wider society. It was building on this by starting to commodify the history of football and showcase the art, yes the art, in the football of yesteryear but also the extended, international football world. The ’84 book more than any other epitomised the struggle between old and new football and ’85 showed how new was winning.

I’m out of books now but the ’84 and ’85 centre spreads were the shape of things to come, for me. These two pages featured reproductions of iconic, historic game programmes and posters. It really was a thing of beauty. World Cup, FA Cup, Home Internationals, foreign programmes and also foil stickers of cups that English clubs could win. And in ’85, the international stars we were starting to see more regularly on television were becoming more visible.

Panini were evolving football’s oeuvre and dragging it into the 20th century and Big Ron was the poster boy. They were laying the ground work for Sky TV to run with in just a few years time. They documented the rise of football into a mainstream event and maybe even influenced it’s evolution. The kids of the 80s grew up into the ad executives and TV producers of the 90s. Now, of course, you can’t move for sponsored stuff and the Premier League has more sharp suits than you can shake a sticker at.

Panini did not just create sticker books, they moved football on. Hmmm … Nah mate they’re just stickers, it is just a sticker book.