The report says Butler’s album had been missing just one sticker: Chile, bought for £150 after a search that had stretched across more than half a century. That detail gives the story its charm.
In football, that matters. The obsession is rarely about market value alone. It is about finishing something that once felt unfinished.
There are few World Cups wrapped in romance quite like Mexico 1970. It remains the tournament many fans picture when they think of football’s golden age.
The report says Butler was 13 when he followed that competition from Lancashire, worrying about the heat and marvelling at the players in his album. That is instantly familiar to anyone who has ever linked football to a bedroom wall, a schoolyard swap or a treasured book of stickers.
There is a lovely sting in Butler’s other reported line that his children “terão de dar um lance” if they want the album one day. It is a joke, but also a reminder: football inheritance is emotional before it is financial.
And that is the real next chapter here. As the game moves toward another World Cup era and a new generation builds its own collections, stories like this keep surfacing - proof that football’s strongest archive is still personal memory.