"Yeah I'll swap you a Les Ferdinand and a Kevin Pilkington for a Shiny Villa kit"

These words will be very familiar to any one who grew up in the nineties. Back then life was simpler all you had to worry about was getting the right hand side of the Manchester United team and wonder why you kept getting Wimbledon players. You were looked upon as a god if you had a premiership crest(The creme de la creme of stickers).

If you haven't figured out yet what i'm talking about, it's Merlin's Premier league sticker collection. This sensation took up many of the irish youths minds during the late nineties. four packs would roughly cost 1 pound and in it would contain six normal sized stickers and one big sticker. once you got a sticker you would place it in it's designated spot in the book. If you were unfortunate enough to get a sticker that you already had you would put it in your swap pile to swap with a friend before during and after school. The stickers were somewhat regarded as a primitave form of currency where some stickers held more weight when compared to others. shiny stickers would come into force here, these stickers would not be in every pack you would of been really lucky if you got two in a pack, three shiny's in a pack was seen as legendary and perhaps unheard of.

Some Stickers would be very common while some would be impossible, as I said earlier the no.1 sticker would be the premiership crest, it too was a shiny. the more common stickers would include player such as phillipe Albert, Richare Shaw, Matt Le Tissier and Frank LeBoeuf.

Each team would be deignated six pages. The first two would contain the Teams crest, jersey, a picture of the team and it's top scorer. The middle two pages would contain the team and the back two pages would have three stickers for the hotshot, superstar and a international player. included would be various stats regarding the team. In the middle of the book would be for some reason stickers regarding McDonalds? Basically this fad would start in january and end in april,usually wondering what to do with five stickers of John fashanu.