Panini Group

• 1. Introduction

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  Panini is an Italian company that got its start not in a factory, but in a newspaper distribution office in Modena, Italy in 1960. Brothers Benito and Giuseppe Panini stumbled onto a collection of unsold figurines from a Milan company that could not move them. Rather than walk away, the brothers bought the entire collection and sold them in packets of two for ten lire each. They sold three million packets.

  That accidental windfall raised an obvious question: if three million packets of someone else's figurines could sell, what might happen with figurines they made themselves? A year later, Giuseppe had the answer. Panini sold fifteen million packets in its very first year of operation.

  What began as a newspaper delivery business became, over the following decades, one of the most widely recognised names in collectibles anywhere on earth. How did a small operation in northern Italy grow to hold licences for the FIFA World Cup, the NBA, the NFL, the NHL, and a long list of domestic football leagues across multiple continents? And what happens when decades of deal-making attract the kind of legal battles that come with dominant market power?

• 2. The Brothers Behind the Brand

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  Giuseppe Panini founded the company in 1961, with Benito joining the same year. The family did not stop there. Franco and Umberto Panini joined in 1963, making it a business of four brothers working out of Modena.

  The Panini brothers were not just businessmen running a collectibles operation. Giuseppe was a collector in his own right. He financed the creation of the Raccolte Fotografiche Modenesi, an archive of more than 300,000 photographs and a similar number of postcards documenting the life of Modena and the evolution of photographic art.

  Giuseppe also channelled his connection to Modena into sport. In 1966, he founded a professional volleyball club that would later become known as Modena Volley.

  Umberto Panini died on the 29th of November 2013, at the age of 83. In 1986, the company built a museum of figurines and donated it to the city of Modena in 1992, a gesture that reflected how deeply the family tied its identity to its hometown.

• 3. The 1970 World Cup and a Sticker Revolution

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  Mexico 1970 changed everything. Panini published its first FIFA World Cup sticker album for that tournament, and it was the first time the company used multilingual captions and sold stickers outside of Italy.

  The timing mattered. The Guardian later wrote that in the United Kingdom, "the tradition of swapping duplicate World Cup stickers was a playground fixture during the 1970s and 1980s." That playground habit was a direct export of what Panini launched in 1970.

  The decade brought another practical change: Panini began introducing self-adhesive stickers in the early 1970s, replacing the older glue-based figurines the brothers had first sold in packets of two.

  Panini also began publishing L'Almanacco Illustrato del Calcio Italiano in 1970, an illustrated guide to Italian football, after buying the rights from the publishing house Carcano. That single World Cup album launched a tradition that would carry the company's name into households across the world for the next five decades. By 2017, a 1970 World Cup Panini sticker album signed by Pele sold for a record £10,450.

• 4. Digital Stickers and World Cup Scale

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  In May 2006, Panini partnered with The Coca-Cola Company and Tokenzone to produce the first virtual sticker album for the FIFA World Cup. The album was viewable in at least ten languages, including Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

  The scale of the operation grew with each tournament. For the 2014 World Cup, three million FIFA.com users took part in the Panini Digital Sticker Album contest. By 2018, five million people gathered digital stickers, and Panini developed a dedicated app that allowed fans to collect and swap virtual versions of the physical product.

  The physical side of the 2018 tournament gave some sense of the company's production capacity. Panini produced an average of eight to ten million card packages per day during that World Cup.

  Not everyone engaged with the product as intended. A couple from Oxford, dubbed the "Panini Cheapskates" in 2018, won attention on social media by filling in their 2018 World Cup sticker album by drawing each player by hand rather than purchasing stickers.

• 5. American Expansion and Sports Licences

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  In January 2009, the NBA announced Panini as its exclusive trading card partner beginning with the 2009-10 season. Two months later, on the 13th of March 2009, Panini acquired the assets of Donruss Playoff LP, the industry's second-oldest trading card company. The new American subsidiary, Panini America, continued operating out of Irving, Texas, with much of the existing upper management in place.

  With Donruss came the NFL and NFLPA licences. In March 2010, the NHL and NHLPA granted Panini a multi-year trading card licence, making it the third major North American sports licence the company had secured in just over a year.

  The 2010 FIFA World Cup sticker album sold ten million packs in the United States alone. That same year, Panini acquired a licence to create an official sticker collection for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London 2012.

  Panini America signed an exclusive agreement with Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers as its official company spokesman and global trading card ambassador in 2009. Bryant's connection to the brand was personal; he had grown up in Italy and collected Italian football stickers as a child.

• 6. Licences Lost, Gained, and Contested

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  Panini's licence with the Major League Baseball Players Association expired at the end of 2022. Without it, the company could no longer produce baseball cards featuring players covered by the union contract. Panini kept making baseball cards, but could only depict individuals outside the MLBPA's reach, typically retired or deceased players and minor leaguers. Collectors named these "pajama cards" because the player uniforms had been edited to remove team logos and trademarks, leaving the athletes appearing to wear plain clothing.

  Also in 2022, Topps replaced Panini as the producer of UEFA Champions League stickers and trading cards, ending a long-running partnership with European football's top club competition.

  In November 2025, the WNBA players' association agreed to a new licensing deal with Panini described as the largest licensing deal on record for a women's sports rightsholder. That same month, rival company Wild Card filed an antitrust lawsuit against Panini America in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleging that Panini had warned distributors in 2021 that carrying Wild Card products would have "consequences," causing several to withdraw support.

  In May 2026, global sports platform Fanatics signed an exclusive collective licensing deal with FIFA covering World Cup collectibles from 2031 onward, ending a partnership between FIFA and Panini that had lasted over five decades.

• 7. The Fanatics Lawsuit

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  In August 2023, Panini America filed an antitrust lawsuit against Fanatics, alleging anticompetitive conduct in the sports trading card market. Fanatics denied the allegations and filed a countersuit the same month, asserting that its licensing agreements had been lawfully negotiated and that Panini itself had engaged in improper business practices during related negotiations.

  The Wild Card complaint, filed in November 2025, added a further dimension to the legal picture. It claimed Panini had hired Citibank to explore a potential sale of the company while simultaneously arguing that Fanatics' acquisition of Topps would make it harder for Panini to remain profitable. Wild Card sought injunctive relief and neutral allocation policies.

  The legal disputes arrived alongside a structural shift in the industry. Panini's 2023 lawsuit against Fanatics and Fanatics' subsequent FIFA deal, announced in May 2026 with an effective date of 2031, positioned the two companies as direct rivals for the same licences at the same time that courts were weighing their competing claims of market misconduct. Litigation between Panini and Fanatics remained ongoing as of that announcement.