Day 11 Update - Panini World Cup 2018 - A statisical journey!

And so it begins.....

I arrived home a couple of nights ago to the news that my wife had treated my 5-year-old son to a "Free" Panini Russia 2018 Sticker Album. Oh dear lord! Free? Free???? It seems she was unaware that Cambridge based Proffessor Paul Harper recently calculated that it would cost £773 on average to complete the album by simply buying stickers from the shops.

But he's got it now, and despite having pretty much zero interest in football until this point, after three packets he is hooked, so I'm going to have to embrace it. It might even prove money well spent if I can migrate him from minecraft and transformers into the wonderful world of Association Football. This will be his coming-of-age, his first real World Cup (he watched pretty much all the matches in 2014, but as a one-year-old is unlikely to remember too much from Brazil.

So here's the challenge. We are going to document our journey through the collection of the entire album over the coming month or so, utilising every avenue possible to avoid remortgaging the house to complete a single A4 sized book. We'll be buying en-mass from google, swapping, sending off for the final 50. Everything we can do to cut the cost, we're going to try and we'll see where we end up.

With stickers costing 16p each, and 682 needed that would be £109 if you got a different sticker literally every time. We're aiming to do it for under £150. So let's see how we go!

Day 1

So the album is here (free) and we have our first six stickers inside. Boom - early England player in there as well - Eric Dier. He's a happy boy and we haven't spent a penny.

Total Unique Stickers = 6

Total Swapsies = 0

Total Spend = £0.00

Day 2

Two packs added today at newsagent prices. That's another 15 stickers at a cost of £1.60. All brand new unique examples. So far so good. Oh, except zero excitement from the lad at getting Mo Salah in his first ever pack. He's got a lot to learn - he was more excited with Ragner Sigurdsson for goodness sake! Tomorow we go shopping for a deal - 100 packs from Mr Google - hoping to pay about £50 and see how we get along there. We'll also run a quick sim in advance of deliver to predict how many uniques/swaps we will end with. #GeekAlert

Total Unique Stickers = 16

Total Swapsies = 0

Total Spend = £1.60

Day 4

So, we've got 36 stickers. No dupes! Good start. Assuming all stickers equally distributed, we should have had a 37.7% of achieving that feat, although its probably a touch more likely as they arent going to give you a swappie in the first six inside the album are they!

Anyway, the world cup is less than a month away now and the little man has a lot still to learn. Sp we've hit ebay.

Thats 100 packets in the post. This is going to help. This is going to help a lot. Rumour has it that there are less dupes in a single box due to the way they are produced. We'll find out wont we.

We ran a quick Monte-Carlo simulation to explore, all stickers being equal, how many uniques should we expect to get from the 500..... The answer looks to be about 355, without too much variance around that either - probably + or - about 20.

This box and whiskers suggests the best we might hope for would be about 370, and we'd be disappointed if we werent at around 340.

We'll get a few more packs before Wednesday when we hope the man with the van turns up with stickers aplenty.

Total Unique Stickers = 36

Total Swapsies = 0

Total Spend = £4.00 (£50 in the post)

Day 11 Update

So the big box has arrived, and we are ploughing through it. Interestingly (if you're a geek like me), we reached sticker number 94 before we hit a swapsie. Pretty incredible that. The chance of getting that far in was literally 0.000584

making us literally 1 in 2000 in terms of sticker collecting ability. Then we hit two in a row :-(

We'll be recording all the packs from the new box to ascertain whether the rumours of them being more "unique" turn out to be true. I've written down the first 20 out of the box. Wish me luck with the next 480......

Any, it's working out very nicely. We've got some shineys. Ok, only Iran and Brazil, but it's a start.

Total Unique Stickers = 94

Total Swapsies = 2 (numbers 71 and 602 if you're interested)

Total Spend = £58 (still lots to open from that super duper box)

Total Legends = ZERO - come on Panini! There is only a 24.1% chance of not having a legend after opening 96 stickers.....

#Football