Northern Ireland Players in Premier League Sticker Albums 1993-2020

1992/93 wasn't the big watershed in English football that everyone keeps harping on about. For sticker collectors at least, that was to come a season later when Panini were usurped as the "premier" sticker collection of the game by Merlin (later Topps, then Merlin again).

Panini did produce the first sticker album of the Premier League era, but notable it wasn't endorsed by the league, "only" by the PFA. Merlin's albums were more stat heavy than Panini's, but lacked the "pen-pics" that had gone before. The scope and size of Merlin's albums varied through the years, starting at 479 stickers in the first edition and rising to around 550 stickers in the late 90s to a peak of 649 in 2008, the collection shrunk to just 310 by the 2019 edition. Merlin also released a series of smaller "Kick-Off" (a few of which were "pocket" sized) and transfer update albums.

After nearly three decades in the wilderness, which included some fairly hap-hazard PFA endorsed collections, Panini returned as the "official" collectors' partner of English topflight football. Their first effort was more Merlin than old-school Panini!