Giuseppe Panini: Obituary

Cast your mind back to the days of running around the school playground during morning break and you will almost certainly know who Giuseppe Panini was, or at least what he was all about. More than two generations of boys in short trousers can thank him for countless hours of obsessive, if ultimately mindless, fun collecting and swapping those card-sized photographs of football players that ended up in jealously guarded team or league albums piled up somewhere near the Scalextric track and the Subbuteo set.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the cards, which started off as glue and paste jobs in the 1960s before evolving into more user-friendly stickers, should have been developed in a football-mad country like Italy. More remarkable is the fact that they were the bedrock of a vast international business empire run by just one man.

Giuseppe Panini came from the humblest of origins, a working-class family from the north Italian town of Modena, and might have expected to progress no further than the main newsstand near the cathedral which his family won the license to operate in the early 1950s.

Giuseppe had little formal education, having left school at 11, but he had the entrepreneur's gift for clear, simple ideas as well as the passion of an inveterate collector - he kept every copy of the daily sports newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport going back to 1929.

While working at the newsstand he noticed the portrait cards that various publishers distributed with their papers and magazines, and hit upon two novel ideas.

The first was to apply the cards to the football craze that he himself shared with the rest of postwar Italy, and the second was to distribute them in packs of five or six together with albums, thus encouraging his customers to keep buying and at the same time get their friends hooked through the frenzied system of swaps that soon grew up.

Like so many successful Italian businessmen, he struck a deep vein in the national culture and then marketed it through clever packaging (the cards were clearly modelled, at first, on the pocket-sized images of saints that have always been popular in Italy as lucky charms). And, like so many others, he made his family the core of the business, employing his two brothers, four sisters and, over the years, any number of nephews and nieces.

The first cards, often rather grainy, out-of-focus affairs, appeared in 1961. By 1986, the business had grown into a major international success story with a turnover of 100 million dollars a year and had expanded beyond football to include figures from television series and Hollywood movies.

Giuseppe Panini hardly fits the model of the international tycoon, though, remaining faithful to his Modenese origins and retaining a thick local accent. He became godfather to the local volleyball team, his other abiding sports passion, and even opened a restaurant to showcase the local specialities, tortelloni and Lambrusco wine.

In the interests of a quieter life, he actually sold the core business to Robert Maxwell in 1989, a disastrous decision that almost pushed a thriving concern into bankruptcy. The Italian publishing company De Agostini bailed it out on Maxwell's death two years later, and it is now in the hands of the US group Marvel.

Giuseppe Panini, businessman: born Pozza di Maranello, Italy 1921; married (three children); died Modena 18 October 1996.