Opa / Grandpa
These collectible cards belong to my grandfather Paul, born in 1920, he kept them in a little cardboard box and showed them to me once or twice. When he died in 2010, I kept them to remind me of him.
The cards are in the pub The Londoner and show scenes from the world cup of 1954 and are made available by Julia Grothey. She inherited them from her grandfather Paul Scheenvoigt, who died in 2010 when she was 19 years old.
“It was always a highlight to contemplate the picture cards together when I visited him,” Julia remembers. She became interested in football early on and therefore moved from Göttingen to Dortmund to go to university. “You cannot get past football in the Ruhr Area”.
The collection includes 80 cards and is almost complete, only the number 27 is missing. “And the number 28 exists twice, but the cards don’t show the same picture. Maybe it is a misprint”?
Where did her grandfather get these cards? Presumably he was a smoker, the cards were included in products of the tobacco company Vogelsang from Bremen during the 1950s.
It is a kind of renaissance, because football pictures exist since 1892 in Germany. The first ones were included in bouillon cube packages, in 1915 they came from the cocoa and chocolate manufacturer Stollwerk and in the 20s the cigarette manufacturer satisfied the collector’s passion.
On the basis of paper scarcity the production of the pictures was shut down almost completely during the second world war, though, after the “miracle of Bern”, various albums by newspaper publishers and cigarette manufacturers had won the hearts of collectors and probably also that of grandpa Paul. He had worked as a precision mechanic at Zeiss in Göttingen, drove a Horex motorcycle and loved to play table tennis.
When it became illegal to include collectible cards in products in 1955, the Panini brother’s time began: they published the first collector’s album with 90 pictures of Italian football teams in 1961 and the first album for the first Bundesliga in collaboration with the Bergmann publishing house in 1979.
The first official Panini album available in Germany was published alongside the football world cup of 1984 in France. A success story – until the exclusive contract from 1980 with the UEFA was cancelled in 2022.
The American company Topps is now in charge of supplying the collectible stickers for the EURO 2024 and 2028.
Text: Daniela Berglehn
Translation: Matthias Fabry