Inflation sees cost of filling Panini Qatar 2022 sticker book skyrocket to £870

The average cost of filling a Panini Qatar World Cup 2022 sticker album has shot up to £870 ($1,006) due to skyrocketing inflation, according to reports.

The Panini sticker album has been a regular feature of World Cups for more than five decades, with collectors filling books with stickers of players competing in the tournament.

Inflation has seen the cost of a five-sticker pack shoot up by 12.5 percent from 80p for the Russia 2018 tournament and 50p for Euro 2016 to 90p now.

If fans are astronomically lucky and never double up on stickers then they could theoretically fill the Qatar 2022 album with just 137 packets or 670 stickers, at a cost of £120.60 ($139).

Mathematicians have calculated that with duplicates of stickers, a more realistic price to complete the album this year will be £870 - an increase from the average of £770 ($890) for Russia 2018. This is more than the cost of a ticket for the World Cup finals itself.

"The first sticker you buy is absolutely guaranteed not to be a duplicate," Paul Harper, a mathematics professor at Cardiff University, said, according to The Guardian.

"The second sticker you get has a 681/682 (99.85%) chance of being a new sticker. The third sticker you get has a 680/682 (99.7%) chance of being a new sticker, and so on."

A common tactic by children to fill the books is to trade duplicate stickers on the playground. But at an average cost of 18p a sticker then the cost of completing the album adds up the closer one gets to completing the album.

"What is interesting is that to collect just the last 19 stickers for the book, you would still be required to buy 483 packets of stickers, or half the total number of expected packets. Put another way, you are only halfway through when you have just 19 stickers left to collect."

A quick search on eBay shows completed books for the 2018 Russia World Cup available for around £50 meaning that filling the albums is unlikely to bring any huge financial rewards in the immediate future.

Panini makes huge amounts from the sticker albums, which have been around since the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, reporting $1.4 billion (£1.2 billion) sales in 2018.

Despite the lack of return on investments, fans of the Panini albums are likely to spend big again to fill the sticker books for this year's tournament in Qatar, the first in the Arab World.