Florence, 15 January 1950, Fiorentina against Juventus. Corrado Banchi, a photographer, is working the match when the Juventus defender Carlo Parola goes up backwards and clears the ball overhead (Goal Italia; ANSA). Banchi takes the picture. The match finishes 0-0 (Goal Italia; Viola News).
That clearance is now on the front of every Panini packet (ANSA; Goal Italia). What is printed there is a drawing made from Banchi's photograph, which makes it as good a place as any to start a history of the illustrated football portrait.
Before the stickers: cigarette cards
Long before stickers, pictures of footballers came free with tobacco. By the early 1900s firms such as Ogden's were printing club star players in full kit onto small cards and packing them into cigarette packets, to be collected in sets (Sheffield Home of Football; Spartacus Educational).
The Second World War stopped them. Paper ran short, and production had been halted by 1940 (the University of Manchester's Rylands Blog; Spartacus Educational).
Modena, 1961: the album
The format that replaced them came out of Modena. The Panini brothers founded their company in 1961 and published their first album, Calciatori, that year, with AC Milan's Nils Liedholm on the cover (Playing Pasts; L'Italo-Americano).
The pictures still arrived in packets, one at a time, in no order anybody could control. What was new was the book, with a numbered space for every player, which turned a pile of cards into a job that was never quite finished.
1970: the overhead kick becomes a logo
Panini had put Parola's overhead kick on an album cover in the mid-1960s (Playing Pasts; Goal Italia). In 1970 the company asked Wainer Vaccari, a young artist in its Modena graphics department, to redraw it (ANSA; Goal Italia).
Vaccari took Parola out of the black and white of Juventus. The figure in the logo wears a red shirt, white shorts and black socks with yellow stripes, colours chosen so the player would belong to no club at all (Goal Italia; Domani, interviewing Vaccari). A Juventus defender clearing a ball in a goalless draw in Florence was promoted to football's anonymous everyman, which is more than most defenders get out of a 0-0.
The same year, Panini made its first World Cup album, for Mexico 1970, the tournament that ended with Brazil's 4-1 final at the Azteca (Destination Calcio; ESPN). It has made every men's World Cup album since, with one exception: the United States in 1994 (ESPN; Front Office Sports).
2026: 864 faces in one book
The 2026 World Cup album is the biggest World Cup collection Panini has made (World Soccer Talk; Sports Illustrated). It holds 980 stickers across the 48 qualified teams, and each team gets 20: a team photo, a badge and 18 players in head-and-shoulders portraits (Panini; Checklist Insider). That is 864 player portraits in a single book.
The packets went from five stickers to seven for this edition, at $2 a packet in the United States (Sports Illustrated; World Soccer Talk) and £1.25 in the United Kingdom (Sports Illustrated; Football Ground Guide). A collector who never pulled a duplicate would need 140 packets to fill it (Sports Illustrated; World Soccer Talk). Duplicates make that a theoretical number. Reuters estimated that a collector buying packets alone could need more than 1,000 (as reported by Sports Illustrated and Football Ground Guide).
FIFA changes the artist
In May 2026 FIFA announced that Fanatics, through its Topps brand, will hold the rights to World Cup stickers and trading cards from 2031. Panini keeps them up to and including the 2030 World Cup, and then the run that began in Mexico ends (FIFA; ESPN; Front Office Sports). Fanatics has promised to give away more than $150 million of collectibles to young people over the life of the deal (FIFA; ESPN).
A declaration first. We draw football portraits ourselves and sell football prints, so we are not a neutral party on who gets to draw the game, and we have yet to put 864 faces in a single book.
With that said, Michael Rubin, the Fanatics founder and chief executive, called the deal "the single biggest thing globally we could do to grow our business" (as quoted by ESPN). That is an honest sentence, and it is the right description of what FIFA has licensed: for sixty years a firm from Modena decided what a World Cup squad looked like in a child's hands, and from 2031 that job sits on a growth plan. FIFA has never been slow to find the commercial value in a World Cup. This time it found it in a children's sticker book.
How The ARCHV draws its portraits
The job has not changed much since Modena: start from a real photograph, then make the picture belong to the story. Our rules for it are these.
- Every portrait starts from a reference photograph whose own caption names the player. No face is ever made up from a description.
- The portrait matches the era of the story. A 1999 story does not get a 2026 face.
- Kit colours stay. Crests, sponsors and makers' marks come out.
- The finished face is checked by eye against the reference before it goes anywhere.
The gallery lives in the Legends Series, and the method behind the art is written up in our field notes.
Illustrated football portraits, a dated record
- Early 1900s: footballers in full kit on tobacco cards, Ogden's among the issuers.
- By 1940: cigarette card production halted by wartime paper shortages.
- 15 January 1950: Banchi photographs Parola's overhead kick, Fiorentina 0-0 Juventus, Florence.
- 1961: Panini's first Calciatori album, Nils Liedholm on the cover.
- Mid-1960s: Parola's overhead kick on a Panini album cover.
- 1970: Vaccari redraws it as the Panini logo; Panini's first World Cup album, Mexico 1970.
- 1994: the one men's World Cup since 1970 without a Panini album.
- 2026: 980 stickers, 48 teams, 864 player portraits.
- 2031: World Cup stickers pass from Panini to Fanatics and Topps.
The best football portrait ever made
Our claim is Vaccari's drawing, and the print run has nothing to do with it. A photograph of Parola would always have been a photograph of a Juventus defender in 1950. The drawing is of nobody in particular, in a kit no club wears, doing the thing every child in a park has tried at least once.
Parola cleared that ball in a 0-0 draw in Florence. It is still in the air.
Sourcing: Goal Italia, ANSA, Viola News, Domani, Playing Pasts, L'Italo-Americano, Destination Calcio, Sheffield Home of Football, Spartacus Educational, the University of Manchester's Rylands Blog, Panini, Checklist Insider, Sports Illustrated, World Soccer Talk, Football Ground Guide, Reuters (via Sports Illustrated and Football Ground Guide), FIFA, ESPN and Front Office Sports.