What football stickers actually carry

End of March already. The year’s moving.

We’re getting going on the layout for Stickerbomb Xtreme, which means working through folders of submissions and seeing what we can pull together.

A few other things are starting to land too: more sticker book development, a quick trip to the Independents Book Fair, to-do lists building up, and getting ready to take a short break.

One thing that caught our eye this week: the French league has postponed Lens vs PSG, giving Paris the weekend off between their Liverpool fixtures. Not something you see often. Football making space for football.

With PSG back in the news, it felt like a good moment to pull out a page from TIFO: The Art of Football Fan Stickers and share it below.

Football stickers are easy to overlook. They sit in the background: on lampposts, signs, service stations, toilet doors, half torn, layered over, fading into the street. You register them without always properly seeing them.

But spend a bit of time with them and they start to say more. Not just design, humour, or allegiance, but memory too. A nickname, a protest, a grudge, a place, a moment someone wanted to hold onto. That became one of the key ideas behind TIFO: not just documenting the stickers themselves, but looking at what they carry.

Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) is the most successful club in France, despite only having been formed in 1970. Le Classique refers to the fiercely contested rivalry between PSG and Olympique de Marseille, the second club in France, founded in 1899.

The boats that appear on Paris Saint-Germain stickers point to the significance of the Seine River to Paris, linking the city’s commercial history with the identity of its football club. It is a reminder that PSG is tied not just to football, but to the wider fabric and symbolism of Paris itself.

Also spotted: Nasty Neckface in London recently. Always good to see that kind of thing still cutting through, especially in the centre of town.

And good to see the young lot at Wood Craft Folk getting into subvertising too, with their Be Nice to Local Foxes and local wildlife campaign. We saw the image below on the Victoria line.

If you do not know the term, subvertising is the practice of altering or replacing corporate or political advertising in public space with parodies or alternative messages. Part artistic activism, part cultural jamming, it is a way of pushing back against the usual visual noise and making room for something else. Very refreshing to see on the Victoria line.

We’ve also signed up for the London Football Book Market, which feels like the right place for TIFO and a few other bits from our world.

Anyway, that’s where things are at this end.

If you enjoyed this, there’s also a post below on how to work with an art and design publisher.

You can also now get a copy of TIFO: The Art of Football Fan Stickers (Revised Edition).

Get your copy here

Have a lovely week all :))

Back soon.