Women’s World Cup sees Scotland return to Panini Sticker album after 21 years

It has long been the perfect foil for the beautiful game, with its stickers traded en masse in playgrounds up and down the country.

Scotland's Women's football team

Now, after an absence of more than two decades, Scotland’s footballers will once more grace Panini’s World Cup sticker album.

With Shelley Kerr’s side preparing for their inaugural tilt at the game’s most prized tournament, her players have already been immortalised in the form of adhesive-backed player portraits.

Two pages in the official Panini sticker book have been set aside for the squad, meaning that young Scots fans will have the chance to collect their heroes for posterity.

Along with places for players such as captain Rachel Corsie and midfield star Kim Little, the spread upholds Panini’s tradition of including a team photograph and a crest. The graphics on the album also feature a saltire.

The Italian firm featured Scotland’s women’s team in its sticker album for the 2017 European Championships in the Netherlands, but it is most famous for an association with the World Cup that stretches back nearly half a century.

Its first World Cup sticker collection was issued for the 1970 men’s tournament in Brazil.

Four years later, when Scotland qualified for the World Cup in Munich, the nation’s best players were represented, although an eyebrow or two was raised by Panini’s decision to bill Willie Ormond’s star striker as Ken Dalglish.

Over the course of the next four World Cups, successive generations of those who pulled on the dark blue were featured in Panini’s albums, with the results often striking.

They included a snatched image of Stevie Archibald – seemingly photographed in the dead of night – ahead of the 1982 tourney in Spain, and a scowling Willie Miller, ready to do battle in Italy in 1990.

When Colin Hendry captained the side that suffered a narrow defeat to Brazil in the opening game of the tourney’s 1998 edition in France, little did he realise the lineage would end with him – at least as far as the men’s team was concerned.

With Kerr’s women making amends, Panini is hopeful that its latest World Cup album will be a hit. The firm says its newest album, which requires completists to collect 480 stickers across 56 pages, comes at a time when there has been a “great increase” in female players worldwide.

Mike Riddell, managing director of Panini UK, said: “We are excited to be launching the FIFA Women’s World Cup collection at a time when the profile of the women’s game is so high and is attracting more and more media attention.”