For the first time after the breakup of Yugoslavia, the sport stickers collectors in North Macedonia have a chance to see their national football team in a sticker book for a European championship.
Judging by the reactions on the social networks and the swarms at the stores and news stands, the most recent sticker book “Euro 2020” by the Italian publisher “Panini” has been causing a huge interest, which adds up to the revelry brought on by the recent victories of the Macedonian national football team.
The sticker album is dedicated to the European football championship that was supposed to happen in 2020, but UEFA decided to postpone it until the 11th of June of this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, without changing its name.
The distribution of the sticker book and the stickers in North Macedonia began at the start of April. During the working hours on Saturday, in front of the “World Press” store in the center of the capital Skopje, people of all ages queued up, waiting patiently to buy the sticker book and the stickers.
On the social networks, the people who have managed to purchase stickers are sharing their impressions, especially those who have managed to find some of the stickers with the domestic football players, especially the team captain Goran Pandev.
братот пандка и џимоти меланија лоли pic.twitter.com/o1jq3ObuUa
— krojanbojan (@krojanbojan) April 3, 2021
The tradition of collecting and sharing the self-adhesive cards is part of the common culture in the former Yugoslavia. In the 70s and the 80s, all across the former Yugoslav federation, apart from the imported sticker books from “Panini”, there was great interest for the domestic ones, such as “Životinjsko carstvo” (Animal Kingdom) from the Croatian confectionery company ” Kraš”. The sticker book were with a wide range of interests, from sports to comics, from TV series to educational content.
In 2006 the Macedonian computer programmer Goran Shlakeski founded the slikicki.com web site, available in Macedonian, English and Slovene, which has become a meeting place of the online community of sticker collectors. On this not-for-profit web site, the collectors publish their collections and arrange barters.
Some of these meetings were quite huge, with hundreds of collector gathering at the Fountain, the popular meeting point at City Park, which “Global Voices” reported about in 2014.
Appart from the network of news stands and other shops, the stickers “Euro 2020” can be also bought through the slikicki.mk web site, run by Dipres dooel – Skopje. The price of one sticker is 8 denars, but they are sold in packs of five, for the price of 40 denars. To fill out the sticker book, the collector has to find a total of 654 unique stickers.
