22 FOOTBALL HEROES
22 FUSSBALLHELDEN

The Cult Sticker Album from the 1998 World Cup
Das Kult-Sammelbilderalbum der WM 1998

Featuring the Original Internet Diary and Other Tales of Life and Survival
Mit dem Originaltagebuch und weiteren Berichten

Rediscovered, expanded, annotated and newly edited by KAI
Wiederentdeckt, ergänzt, kommentiert und neu herausgegeben von KAI

Bilingual English — German / Zweisprachig Deutsch — Englisch
108 pages / Seiten, 15.2 x 0.7 x 22.9 cm / 6 x 9 in, 218 g
Herzglut Books / Herzglut Verlag, September 2026
English – German ISBN-13 978-3-03834-059-1 / Deutsch – Englisch ISBN-13 978-3-03834-058-4

Click here to buy the UK Edition

Link zum deutschsprachigen Buchshop

Once upon a time, heroes were still heroes.

Figures like Hercules, Siegfried and Odysseus.
The firefighter. The self-sacrificing mother.

Nobody called a footballer a «football hero». It was considered presumptuous.

Until, in 1998, Jerzovskaja took the liberty of calling his drawn portraits of footballers «Football Heroes».

Today, the term «football heroes» is everywhere. And nobody — except perhaps Jerzovskaja — finds it strange.

So Jerzovskaja has dug up the beginning of the end of the true heroes: his miniature sticker album «22 Football Heroes». And he has spent more time on this re-edition than he did on the original, which he simply threw together in a fit of youthful exuberance.

Now here it is: the carefully edited re-edition, published bilingually for the first time:

22 Fussballhelden / 22 Football Heroes

A little book about football, collecting, drawing and the pleasure of inventing your own world.

The original 1998 album is reproduced in full — including its 28 grotesque football heroes and their absurd names. For the first time, four additional heroes are also included — characters who never made it into print back then because of a lack of time.

Alongside them are the original texts, including the quirky short diary published at the time exclusively online: a desperate chronicle of the hunt for missing football stickers.

For football fans, «22 Football Heroes» is a journey back to the sticker-collecting world of an earlier era.

For illustrators and designers, it offers a glimpse into the early days of digital tools — and an idiosyncratic analogue way of building an entire world from drawings.

«22 Football Heroes» is a small book to read, browse, laugh at and rediscover.

For the moment, the book is available exclusively through the following book link:
Buy your copy here

It is the summer of 1998. The World Cup is underway. Only 561 stickers are still missing!

While millions of people find fulfilment in completing their sticker albums, Jerzovskaja creates his own universe of football stickers populated by absurd heroes with grotesque names — 22 FOOTBALL HEROES.

His meticulously kept internet diary becomes an ironic chronicle of a collector who, while trying to complete his album, discovers that the missing stickers are not his real problem.

22 FOOTBALL HEROES is a satire on football as an entertainment industry and on humanity’s eternal desire to possess, organise and control everything.

Almost thirty years later, this cult object returns as a witness to a time when a visit to the local kiosk still felt like an adventure.