Fifty packs of 2011 Thai Premier League stickers, one opened every Sunday. The first holds five men from a single season, and the fifteen years since could hardly have treated them more differently.

A football sticker makes one promise it cannot keep: that the man in the picture will always be this age, at this club, in this shirt. Everything worth knowing about him happens after the photograph is taken.

I have a box of them. Thai Premier League 2011, fifty packs, five stickers in each, sealed since the season Buriram won everything there was to win. (Nothing changes!) The plan is simple. Every Sunday I open one pack, lay out whoever falls out of it and find out what the years did next: where they went, what they won, what went wrong and, where they will answer a message, what they make of it all now.

Pack one could not have been dealt better. It contains the goalkeeper of the runners-up, a midfielder from the champions, a striker and a goalkeeper from two of the three relegated clubs, and a 37-year-old Brazilian from newly promoted Chiangrai United. As a cross-section of one season it is almost too neat. As a lesson in what football does with people it is better than that, because two of these careers set off from the same point and bend in opposite directions.

The one who stayed

Sinthaweechai Hathairattanakool · Chonburi

The sticker shows a 29-year-old in Chonburi’s pale blue, hair pushed up at the front, half a smile. He had reason for it. Chonburi finished second in 2011, sixteen points behind a Buriram side nobody could live with, and Sinthaweechai is listed as the league’s player of the year. For a goalkeeper at the club that came second, that is some season.

He was born Kosin Hathairattanakool in Sakon Nakhon, schooled at Assumption Sriracha and a league champion with Tobacco Monopoly in his early twenties. There was a year at Osotspa, a year in Indonesia with Persib Bandung, and then Chonburi in 2007, where he won the league in his first season. He would never win it again, which tells you how the next decade went for everybody outside Buriram and Muangthong.

The national team was a longer and bumpier road. He made his debut against Hong Kong in November 2003 and lost the shirt more than once in his twenties. He won it back for good under Winfried Schäfer, captained the side in 2013, missed the 2012 AFF tournament with a fever and collected three runners-up medals before finally winning the thing in 2016. Somewhere in there Suphanburi paid a reported 15 million baht for him, then a record between Thai clubs, and he sprinted almost to the halfway line to beat Lê Công Vinh to the ball in a World Cup qualifier against Vietnam. The last of his 79 caps was a testimonial against Trinidad and Tobago in October 2018.

He stopped playing in 2024, at 42, and went straight back to the club on the sticker. As Chonburi’s team manager he stood in as head coach for four games, saw them win Thai League 2 and return to the top flight in 2025, left for a short spell in charge of Police Tero, and came home again. In April the club extended his contract through 2026/27. Fifteen years on, the badge behind his shoulder in that photograph was the one he worked for.

Update, 13 October 2026: Two days after this piece was published, Chonburi ended his time as team manager, along with that of head coach Rangsan Viwatchaichok. The club said results and direction had fallen short of its targets: the side had lost its first four Thai League games of the season and was bottom of the table. Both men accepted the decision.

The one who fell

Khampheng Sayavutthi · Khon Kaen

His is one of two stickers in the pack with the name printed in Latin script, which is how you spot the foreigners. Khampheng Sayavutthi was 24, a Lao striker who had come across the Mekong to Khon Kaen credited with sixteen goals in eighteen league games at home. Khon Kaen were not built to help him. They finished bottom with 27 points and 68 goals conceded and went straight back down, as newly promoted clubs sometimes do and are meant to be able to.

For Laos he was the real thing. He scored against Indonesia and twice against Singapore at the 2012 AFF Championship. In May 2014, in his country’s first ever match at an AFC Challenge Cup finals, he put them ahead of Turkmenistan with a bicycle kick, and the fact they lost 5-1 does not make the goal any less his. That October he scored twice against Cambodia, the second an 81st-minute free-kick that won the game. He finished with fifteen international goals.

His club career stayed mostly in Thailand, at Angthong and Ayutthaya, with a spell back home at Lanexang United. Then came 5 October 2017 and a friendly in Mong Kok that Hong Kong won 4-0. In February 2020 the Asian Football Confederation’s disciplinary and ethics committee found Khampheng and a team-mate, Lembo Saysana, guilty of conspiring to manipulate that match and banned both from all football-related activity for life. It said it would ask Fifa to extend the bans worldwide and gave no detail, citing a continuing investigation. A third Laos player from the same game was banned later that year.

I have found no public response from him to the finding, and no trace of him in the game since. The sticker is still what it was: a young striker in a pink and white shirt, looking straight at the camera, with the best of it ahead of him.

The rest of the pack

A title winner, a keeper in stripes and a man of nine countries

Yuttajak Kornchan left Nan for Vietnam as a youth player, part of the Thai group that followed Kiatisuk Senamuang to Hoàng Anh Gia Lai, and spent four seasons there before coming home in 2007 to the Provincial Electricity Authority side. He won the league with them in 2008, went to Indonesia, and came back in time for the same club’s move to Buriram and the season on this sticker: one league defeat in 34, fifteen goals conceded, and both cups, the second of them a 2-0 win over Port in the League Cup final. Chainat, Chiangrai United, Navy, Chiangmai and Phrae United followed. He was still playing in Thai League 2 at 39.

Nantapol Supathai is a goalkeeper photographed, for reasons lost to 2011, in Sriracha’s blue and white outfield stripes. He had been voted the best goalkeeper in Division 1 the year before as Sriracha won it. The top flight was harder: 17th, seven wins, straight back down. He moved through Suphanburi, Songkhla United, Navy and Rayong before finding a second career in the north with Phrae United, where a season of 17 games at 39 earned him a new contract. And here the pack folds back on itself. A decade after sharing a foil wrapper, Nantapol kept goal for Phrae away at Chiangmai with Yuttajak Kornchan playing in front of him.

Edvaldo Pereira turned 37 the year this sticker came out and is smiling like a man who knew how unlikely that was. The record, such as it is, has him at Farense in Portugal at 21, Toluca in Mexico at 22, Shanghai Shenhua at 25, with St Gallen in Switzerland and Defensor Sporting in Uruguay somewhere in between, then Venezuela, Malaysia and, in 2009, Port, where he is credited with four goals in sixteen league games. He was at Chiangrai United when they came up in 2010 and when they stayed up in 2011, the only one of the three promoted clubs to manage it. Chiangrai are still in the top division. His last listed club is Phang Nga in 2012, and after that the trail stops.

If you played with him, watched him at PAT Stadium or know where he is now, I would like to hear from you.

What the pack says

Five stickers, 245 to go

Sriracha and Khon Kaen came up together in 2010 and went down together in 2011. Chiangrai came up behind them and stayed. Buriram changed their name that winter and went on to change the league. That is one season of promotion and relegation doing exactly what it is there to do, and a sticker album is the only place the whole ladder gets printed at once, top and bottom on the same sheet, everybody given the same size of rectangle.

What the album cannot tell you is who lasts. On the evidence of five stickers it is not the youngest, or the one with the most goals. A goalkeeper from the team that finished second was still working in the top division when this was written, and lost that job two days later. The striker with fifteen international goals is not allowed near it. There are 49 packs left in the box.

Next Sunday: pack two. Football Siam has contacted Sinthaweechai and Nantapol, and their memories of 2011 will be added here if they reply. Career figures are drawn from published records and are being checked against club and league sources; corrections are welcome.