Panini: Football 79

Having cracked the UK market the previous year, Figurine Panini returned with a new sticker collection – Football 79 – to further establish itself as the leader in its field.

The album's royal blue cover featured an action shot of Liverpool playing Club Brugge in the 1978 European Cup Final, but rather cleverly the designers also added a few well chosen stickers to make the collection even more appealing to young kids.

Inside once again was the trusty fixture grid into which scores could be written, but that was small fry compared to the first main feature of the album – a 6-part map showing the locations of all the league teams of England, Scotland and Wales. The map proved so popular that it returned the following year in Panini's Europa 80 album.

The stickers of the Football 79 collection were more rectangular compared to Football 78, but once again there were 17 of them for each team – 15 players, plus a badge and a team picture on every double page spread. The player stickers had a less cluttered look than before with each player name displayed simply at the bottom while a small pictogram featured just above it to indicate the team name, colours and badge.

The main talking point for Football 79, however, wasn't the player stickers but the team badges. For the first and so far only time in Panini's rich history of sticker production in the UK, team badge stickers were made from fabric rather than metallic foil. The fabric itself had a silky texture and a silvery sheen which was a masterstroke of design and added a tactile element to an otherwise papery norm.

Quite why these silky silver badges never returned in subsequent years is unclear, but one can only assume Panini (and the collectors of its stickers) favoured the shiny foils in far greater numbers. A shame as this was an example of great originality on the part of the Italian manufacturer.

The page layouts were much neater for this second domestic collection and a preference for showing the player biographies below the stickers was established in this album. Sticker spaces were decorated on either side by a column of red globe symbols while the text (including the team profiles) appeared in blue. For the Scottish League Premier Division, all the teams were given equal prominence at last although the club badges featured a green background rather than the silver one favoured by their English counterparts.

For the English Second Division, the same format was used as for Football 78. Each club had a badge and team picture – both in landscape aspect this time – with the badges sporting a gold background and a football symbol to the right of each one. The usual array of facts and figures for each team was on show, printed in blue throughout and accompanied again by a fixture grid.

Among the inevitable array of curiosities found within the Football 79 album are a youthful looking Sam Allardyce sporting the sort of moustache that no 25-year-old should ever have, Chelsea's Clive Walker sporting the frizzy blond hair and black beard combo that no-one should ever have and QPR goalkeeper Phil Parkes sporting the shaggy dog look that frankly no shaggy dog should ever have. All that, and the first sight of shirt sponsorship courtesy of Hibernian's affiliation with Bukta. Something for everyone, then, in this excellent Panini sticker album.

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Subbuteo World (Catalogue I), 1979

For just ten of your British pennies, this catalogue could have been yours in the late 1970's, a small price to pay for the unfettered joy that lay within. Twenty-four half-size pages filled with every possible football team, accessory and Subbuteo set was displayed in full colour and capable of generating so much excitement in the juvenile mind that there barely seemed any point in buying the stuff at all.

I say that because this was a doorway into the realms of fantasy that any young football fan would have genuinely relished. Inside we get The Subbuteo Story, a history of the table soccer game in three paragraphs that reminded the reader how this simple pastime had grown and grown over more than three decades.

There was How to play Subbuteo, a worthwhile précis for the newcomer that basically says 'flick the players to move the ball to score goals.' Well you never know – this could have been read by a girl, conceivably.

We see six different Subbuteo Soccer sets available to purchase, each with a differing array of components and each aimed at a variety of budgets. Whether you wanted a basic Display Edition (teams, balls, goals but no pitch) or the full Stadium Edition (containing teams, a pitch, balls, floodlights, ball boys, a scoreboard and a section of grandstand), you couldn't help but let your mind boggle at the choice on offer.

But all of that was nothing compared to the main feature of this catalogue and many others (to say nothing of wallcharts) – the six pages featuring 322 Subbuteo teams in all their myriad colours and patterns. How many hours must have been lost by the thousands of kids gazing in wonderment at the regimented rows of vivid and bright figures before them. Some were familiar, others less so but they were never unfamiliar for long. A quick check of the 6-page index would quickly tell you that the team wearing red and white quartered shirts with red socks and shorts was actually the Italian club Rimini - a team you were never likely to buy but you wouldn't have left out of the catalogue for all the world.

At the back, there were pictures of all the things you could buy to personalise your Subbuteo collection beyond comprehension. Tournament goals, 'live action' goalkeepers (spring-loaded, of course), TV camera crews – hell, even the World Cup itself if you were prepared to squint a bit. And if football wasn't your thing, why not pay the 10p anyway and check out the Subbuteo Rugby and Cricket sets. The enormous cricket-bat-on-a-stick and the oversized ball seemed a little bit odd, but then, like rugby, cricket was for strange people anyway.

And that was that, except for one final note: this was the first of two near-identical Subbuteo catalogues produced in 1979. The other was released later in the year and was different in only one small detail – it had the Iran national football team in its listings. Never let it be said that Subbuteo didn't cater for all tastes.

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