This year, like every World Cup year, I've been collecting stickers to fill the official Panini World Cup sticker album. Back in March, I calculated that I should expect it to cost £268.99 to fill this year's album (if I order the last 50 stickers). As of 6pm yesterday, I need 47 stickers to complete the album (and have placed an order on the Panini website for these).

So... How much did it cost?

In total, I have bought 1781 stickers (including the 47 I ordered) at a cost of £275.93. The plot below shows the money spent against the number of stickers stuck in, compared with the what I predicted in March.
To create this plot, I've been keeping track of exactly which stickers were in each pack I bought. Using this data, we can look for a few more things. If you want to play with the data yourself, there's a link at the bottom to download it.


The bar chart below shows the number of copies of each sticker I got (excluding the 47 that I ordered). Unsurprisingly, it looks a lot like random noise.
The sticker I got most copies of was sticker 545, showing Panana player Armando Cooper.
Armando Cooper on sticker 545
I got swaps of 513 different stickers, meaning I'm only 169 stickers short of filling a second album.

First pack of all swaps

Everyone who has every done a sticker book will remember the awful feeling you get when you first get a pack of all swaps. For me, the first time this happened was the 50th pack. The plot below shows when the first pack of all swaps occurred in 500,000 simulations.
Looks like I was really quite unlucky to get a pack of all swaps so soon.

Duplicates in a pack

In all the 345 packs that I bought, there wasn't a single pack that contained two copies of the same sticker. In fact, I don't remember ever getting two of the same sticker in a pack. For a while I've been wondering if this is because Panini ensure that packs don't contain duplicates, or if it's simply very unlikely that they do.
If it was down to unlikeliness, the probability of having no duplicates in one pack would be:
\begin{align} \mathbb{P}(\text{no duplicates in a pack}) &= 1 \times\frac{681}{682}\times\frac{680}{682}\times\frac{679}{682}\times\frac{678}{682}\\ &= 0.985 \end{align}
and the probability of none of my 345 containing a duplicate would be:
\begin{align} \mathbb{P}(\text{no duplicates in 345 packs}) &= 0.985^{345}\\ &= 0.00628 \end{align}
This is very very small, so it's safe to conclude that Panini do indeed ensure that packs do not contain duplicates.

The data

If you'd like to have a play with the data yourself, you can download it here. Let me know if you do anything with it...

Similar posts

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