Euro 2000
The copy is enriched with:
– the ticket to the final (July 2, 2000, Feijenoord Stadium “De Kuip,” Rotterdam);
– the official pennant of the final;
– a photograph of the players and coaching staff on the pitch after the trophy presentation.
The photograph is signed and inscribed by Henri Émile, “superintendent” of the French national team for thirty years. As assistant to the head coach, Henri Émile won every major international trophy with the French teams: Olympic champion in 1984, European champion in 1984 and 2000, and World Cup champion in 1998.
In 1961, two brothers who sold newspapers in Modena, Giuseppe and Benito Panini, noticed children fighting over footballer photographs slipped into chocolate bars. To help sell their magazines, they had the idea of doing the same. The result was an immediate success: they launched Calciatori (“Footballers” in Italian), a collectible card album devoted to players in the Italian football championship — the very first Panini album. Glue was even supplied with the magazine so that the pictures, sold in small packets, could be pasted in. Subsequent albums covered animals and other sports, with equal success. Two more Panini brothers then joined the firm, and one of them, Umberto, developed the Fifimatic, a packaging machine designed to act as an impartial mixer: every sticker was produced in equal quantity, and the machine guaranteed that no packet contained a duplicate.
With the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, Panini launched the first international edition of the album, bringing together images of all the participating national teams. Its success was soon amplified by the introduction of the fully self-adhesive picture, the “sticker”: the next international edition, produced for the 1974 World Cup in Germany, was the first to take the definitive sticker form still used today. Six years later, Panini began covering the European Championships with Europa 80 in Italy. The album issued for Euro 2020 [postponed to 2021 because of Covid] was the last published by Panini: UEFA transferred the rights to the official album to another publisher for the 2024 edition. Panini will now concentrate on FIFA and national competitions.