Desirable, highly collectable and cataloguing the story of an entire sport, the football card and sticker album is a rather unique form of antique that UK collectors, in particular, find highly valuable.
Sporting memorabilia has many dedicated collectors, and for over a century collecting football cards has been highly popular.
What is interesting is that its history is as long and as complex as the sport it commemorates.
The first known run of football cards was released in 1896, less than a decade after the formation of the Football League itself.
Manchester-based tobacco company Marcus & Company released a set of cards in cigarette packets. It featured over 100 players and caught on very quickly.
The initial push for football cards was to help keep smokers loyal to one brand over another. The idea was that if you wanted to collect the cards or had a child that did you would keep buying this particular brand. This would later be seen with promotions such as Sainsbury’s collectable medals.
It caught on, and at least nine other tobacco companies would create sets within a decade. The first set in colour would be Ogden’s in 1906 and several companies would follow suit not long after.
They would gradually rise in popularity until the 1940s, where the outbreak of the second world war led to severe rationing of paper, suddenly killing the card trend in the UK.
Across the world, however, especially in Argentina, football cards remained popular, and in 1961 an Italian company named Panini would create their very first collection of Italy’s Serie A players.
By 1970 they produced their very first sticker album for the World Cup in Mexico, and stickers have been swapped ever since.