Despite my best attempts to convince myself that it is an educational tool which serves as an excellent way of getting to know footballers from far-flung corners of the globe before this summer's World Cup, there is something comically pathetic about a man of my advanced years entering a shop with the sole intention of purchasing a Panini World Cup sticker album.

The temptation to save face by slipping it inside a more grown-up periodical in a bid to avoid embarrassment at the cash register is overwhelming. A copy of the Guardian, perhaps. Or maybe some special-interest adult literature from the top shelf.

If buying a football sticker album is slightly shameful, it is nowhere near as unedifying as the spectacle of a 41-year-old man embarking on a lone, foul-mouthed tirade at person or persons unknown upon returning home and excitedly ripping open the plastic wrapper only to discover that an unscrupulous shoplifter had already infiltrated it and stolen the five packets of stickers that accompany each new album.

My failure to check they were there before purchasing was a schoolboy error in the pursuit of simple schoolboy pleasures. I had been the unwitting victim of a carefully orchestrated sticker heist and now 25 of them, the free foundations on which any self-respecting collection is built, had been stolen: need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need. And seethe. Is nothing sacred?

One of those nicked may even have been the lesser-spotted Joel Campbell. The Arsenal striker, on loan at Olympiakos and likely to line up for Costa Rica at the World Cup, made amusing headlines last week after buying 100 packets of stickers in a bid to locate the all important rectangle No296: his own.

Much to his disappointment, it wasn't among the 500 stickers he bought, although photographic evidence of the aftermath of his foil-tearing frenzy suggests he has no shortage of Neymars available to anyone prepared to help him out with "swapsies".

Filling the album is an expensive business. As well as your own bespoke personalised portrait for inside the front cover, there are 639 windows to fill and packets of stickers cost 50p each. Enthusiasts smart enough to check the integrity of their album's packaging before leaving the shop get their five "starter" packets of five, along with another six stickers which come in the form of a fairly unshopliftable bonus insert between inside front and back cover and first and last page.

Yaya Touré? Got. Cristiano Ronaldo? Got. Hugo Lloris? Got. Gonzalo Higuaín? Got. Roman Shirokov? Got. Daniele De Rossi? Got. That leaves only 633 spaces to fill – a little bit less than 124 packets bought blind at an accumulative total of around £64.

That's the minimum spend, in the preposterously unlikely event that you're lucky enough to get stickers you actually need each time, rather than end up withmultiple Han Kook-youngs, Phil Jagielkas and Wakaso Mubaraks.

The alternative, as I have learned, is to nick them from the wrappers of unsold albums on the shelves of less than diligent retailers, although the Guardian would never condone such behaviour.

Well, it would, but some other low-life has already beaten us to the punch of that particular wheeze, so it's too late.

As well as players, the official World Cup sticker album features the usual highly sought-after "shinys", special glitter stickers featuring the Panini logo, Fifa Fair Play logo, official World Cup ball, World Cup trophy, World Cup mascot and badges for each of the 32 competing teams.

That's a lot of shininess. Perhaps best of all, it also features two-part half-and-half stickers of the various World Cup stadiums, a state of affairs that enables collectors to add to the tournament's authenticity by leaving many of the grounds half-finished in the run-up to kick-off. My first packet of stickers contained 50% of the Arena da Baixada in Curitiba. Five more packets down the road and the other half remains elusive, presumably on the grounds that nobody knows what it looks like because it hasn't been built yet.

Of course, if there is one organisation you can count on to suck the joy out of the simple pleasure of ripping open a foil packet, excitedly surveying the contents and then carefully inserting them in the pertinent spaces of a book (making sure not to leave an air bubble or you'll have to bin the whole jamboree and start again from scratch), it is Fifa. "Thanks to the support of presenting partner, Coca-Cola," world football's governing body has enabled a facility that allows fans to collect and trade "virtual stickers" before the World Cup.

Virtual stickers. The football equivalent of World of Warcraft obsidium bolts or justice points. Did you ever hear the like? The once noble and hitherto ungeeky pastime of football album completion has entered the realms of the nerdishly unwell. We can at least take some comfort from the knowledge that stickers which do not exist cannot be stolen.