Women’s football continues to take steps towards equality, and this time it comes in the form of a sticker collection. Thanks to the collaboration agreement between Panini and the F League, the youngest —and those who are not so young— will be able to exchange and add to their new album the stickers of the stars of the Professional Women’s Soccer League, such as those of Mapi León , Nahikari García or Amaiur Sarriegi.
The agreement, which will run until the 2026-2027 season, was signed this Wednesday by Lluís Torrent, general director of Panini in Spain, and Beatriz Álvarez, president of the F League. “It represents an exciting challenge that we are going to face with the utmost rigor , the maximum guarantees and the maximum intensity, as is usual in all the collections that we develop in the Panini Group”, pointed out Torrent.
This agreement is a historic event not only for Spanish women’s football, but for women’s football in general, since it will be the first time that a collection can be completed on the highest women’s competition in a country at club level both in Spain and in Europe.
On a social level, this fact will be an opportunity for boys and girls to get to know the players more closely and to take them as references. “This collection is going to be a new milestone and another strategic step in the expansion and visibility of the F League”, commented Beatriz Álvarez.
Despite the new news, women’s soccer cards already have a precedent. During the 2011 World Cup held in Germany, Panini released a collection for the occasion. This fact was repeated in the World Cup editions of Canada 2015 and France 2019, and will do the same in 2023 when the World Cup is held in Australia and New Zealand.
However, given the lack —until now— of an official collection of stickers for the league competition, there are several fans who in recent years have decided to make their own versions. In 2020, the journalists Iker Iglesias and Álvaro Carmona made an album of the Iberdrola League and lower category teams and shared it altruistically with the rest of their followers.
But perhaps the best-known story is that of María Vázquez, a journalist from Montijo who handcrafted a collection made up of more than 250 stickers of the players of the Women’s Professional League for her three daughters. This initiative went viral on social networks, and several clubs and photographers offered her help to complete the album.
With the launch of this project by Panini, behind us are the words of Lluis Torrent when in 2019 he assured that the launch of a collection of stickers for the women’s league was “far from happening”, since, in his words, “We took it out in the World Cup and nothing worked.”
