The moment everyone has been waiting for is only a few weeks away. It is the championship of championships, the most glorious out of all trophies, the greatest show: it’s the World Cup. A tournament for just the best of the best, a tournament every kid dreams about merely witnessing live. The FIFA World Cup might be the single most anticipated event in the world. Knowing this, it is no surprise that the preparation for the World Cup is quite dramatic for followers as well.

A few months before the inauguration ceremony, the World Cup hype begins to grow within millions of followers across the world. Colombia is one of the countries where the World Cup hype can be felt the most. This makes our school be highly influenced by it. At campus,  the hype is seen manifested through the classic Panini World Cup Album. Students from all grades engage themselves in the special quest of gathering all 670 stickers, making the sticker exchange at school extremely high.

As Miguel Salazar, Junior student at TCS said, “Once you start with the album you become addicted, that is why you can see people all the time exchanging stickers in the hallways and during classes.”.

Students claim that involving yourself in such an activity is not easy, as it involves sacrifice and dedication. However, what does it actually take?

Cost

One of the main reasons why filling the album can problematic and challenging for students is because of the amount of money you have to invest in it.  

“You do think twice before buying the album because that amount of money is difficult to get, especially when your parents do not sponsor you,” said Salazar.

The album alone costs only 5,000 pesos, but the stickers can get expensive. Every individual pack comes with 5 stickers and costs 2,100 pesos. The album has a total of 670 stickers. This means that the minimum amount of money you can spend on stickers would be 281,400 pesos, since you would have to buy 134 packs. However, this is not close to reality since about half the stickers you get overall are repeated stickers ( already had them). That means that the actual amount of stickers you have to buy is much greater than the total amount of stickers in the album ( 670).

“It took my about 400,000 pesos to complete the album. After I bought my first 150 packs [750 stickers], I still had about 100 stickers missing in my album,” said Salazar.

If you think about it, 400,000 pesos in Colombia is a huge amount, considering that it is half the minimum wage.

Time

Filling the album can also be very time-consuming. For people who buy many packs at once, logistics can get tedious. Pedro Uribe, Junior student, explained why.

“When I opened my first 100 packs at once, I had to first group each one of the 500 stickers by teams,  paste each one, write down the ones that I had twice, write down the ones that I was missing, and throw all of the garbage away. Overall, it took my about 4 hours to do all the job. I ended up exhausted,” said Uribe.

However, that is not even the worst part for those who collect all stickers. When people get close to finishing the album, they stop buying packs and start exchanging their “repetidas” with others. This can complicate things even more.

“When you have around 300 repetidas for exchanging and have to look for specific stickers to give to a friend out of a list of 100 possible stickers you can give to him, it can be problematic. You have to check the number of every single one of your 300 stickers, look in your friend’s list of 100, make sure if whether your friend needs that sticker or not, and then double check to see if you didn’t take out the same sticker twice,” said Uribe.

All of these logistics really take up a lot of time. On top of that, some stickers are extremely rare, and thus it takes students forever to find them.

Even though time and money do play up a huge part of completing the album, most TCS students decide to complete it anyways due to what it represents and also to keep up with the tradition.  Some even enjoy the struggle after all.

“I am not even a huge soccer fan, but I know the album is a huge tradition which holds a great sentimental value. It is simply a tradition and no matter how much you have to sacrifice for it, even someone like me thinks it is worth it,” said Esteban Arango, Junior student at TCS.