1950 Bolletje World Football Album No.1

Album name:
Bolletje Wereld Voetbalalbum No. 1
(Bolletje World Football Album No.1)

Manufacturer/Brand:

Bolletje Beschuit Fabriek
(Bolletje Rusk Factory)

Year and country published:
1950, The Netherlands

Set includes:
132 player photos
(120 cards and 12 stickers)

In 1950 Bolletje -a dutch rusk producer / bakery shop- released this album, along with a total of 132 pictures/cards from national football team players of Hungary, Uruguay, Brazil, Yugoslavia, Russia, France, Belgium, West Germany, England and The Netherlands.

On the first page of the album, a brief introduction begins with the headline
“The photos of all these players are real”.

“It took more than a year to get these photos together. This is the first album

with the national teams of 10 countries. After this series there will be another 10 countries issued, so that after some time you will be able to put together the national teams of every country from the 1950 FIFA World Cup”.

Bolletje has not fulfilled this promise; there were no more albums printed since. Part of the reason was most likely the fact that many teams withdrew their participation from the world cup, for different reasons, so that there were only 13 teams participating in the end.

This album measures 23.5 x 11 cm (9.25 x 4.33 inches)

On each of the 10 inner pages there are 12 contiguous insert boxes in which the photo images of an entire football team. The pictures are only 35 x 45 mm (1.37 x 1.77 inches) in size. Each picture shows a photo portrait of a player with the name and underneath the country, and the flag of the country in the top right of the image.

The intention was that the cards were held under lukewarm water for 30 seconds and then the paint of the image could be pasted into the album, similar to how "sticker tattoos" work. Unfortunately, this often went wrong and to make matters worse the pictures also often stuck together.

The back of each card is identical, providing instructions on how to paste the images into the album.

Below are the 10 national teams listed with their 12 players respectively (The dutch team has 12 additional "Ned.Prof." stickers, so they have 24 player cards in total).
The list is not entirely complete, so if you happen to have photos of players that are not in here, please let me know by dropping a comment.

Hungary

Uruguay