The 1975-76 Topps Football Card Set
Piecing together what history I can trace
The 1975-76 Topps Football Card Set
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m an American.
I grew up in the heyday of the baseball card bubble. I spent most of my allowance as an elementary school student on baseball cards. None of them ever turned out to be worth anything, sadly.
I also spent hours upon hours reading about the baseball card industry, which is affectionately referred to by collectors as The Hobby. The history of the industry is surprisingly well documented, and the lore and stories of rare cards are simply fascinating.
It wasn’t until very recently that I learned about the world of association football cards in England. And one thing that struck me as odd was that Topps, the famous baseball card company, came out with major sets for a few years starting with 1975-76.
Those of you who didn’t grow up in the United States probably don’t know the reputation that the Topps brand has. Topps rose quickly from an upstart bubble gum card company around 1951 to possessing a monopoly on sports cards starting in 1956. For most of the Baby Boom generation, Topps is the only “legitimate” baseball card company, and Topps cards were worth a slight premium over competitor brands for years.
But, of course, I never knew that Topps had a release in England.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that Topps came out with a set of NASL logo stickers in 1979. That was the only Topps soccer release in the United States — and it really wasn’t a release.
But there’s something exciting and fun about the UK-only 1975-76 release.
Part of the draw for me comes from the set design, which mimicks the famous 1975 Topps baseball set almost exactly.
And part, of course, is the fact that this is a big set — a full 220 card set, much larger than most of the small scale local football sets you see.
Interestingly, the set also appears to be relatively inexpensive. I found this eBay listing fairly quickly:
A set like this for under $300 strikes me as a bargain — and also tells me that the market for these cards has never really been all that well established.
But where do the cards come from?
Well, it turns out that the A&BC Chewing Gum Company was the original major creator of bubble gum football cards. A&BC wound up rising quickly, largely because of the company’s ability to sign the Beatles to a trading card contract in 1963.
A&BC apparently entered into a contract with Topps for these photos to be used in an American set, which is the famous 1964 Beatles set:
And these sets were popular. In fact, they were so popular that the few articles about Topps that exist in the 1960s usually cited that 1964 set as evidence of the demand for Topps’ products. You can read more about that on my baseball blog:
Now, at some point in time the partnership between the two companies turned into a falling out. Nigel’s Webspace News contains what little information we know about the fallout:
Whatever the reason, Topps took A&BC to court in the UK in the early 1970s, and succeeded in putting the company completely out of business in 1974. And that’s what led to the 1975-76 Topps set.
Now, the market for all of these card sets is pretty unclear. Beatles cards from the 1960s are readily available on eBay at more than reasonable prices. The complete 1975-76 Topps set doesn’t appear to be quite as common, but also doesn’t command particularly high prices.
And there are a ton of questions.
I’m not sure if there are any rare or short printed cards, for example. I also don’t know if there are any variations to look out for — the sort of thing that most serious card collectors pay a lot of attention to.
Oddly enough, I haven’t even been able to locate an image of an unopened wax pack, let alone a wax box. I know nothing about the distribution of cards, including precisely how many cards appeared in each pack, whether there were different varieties of packs (i.e. wax pack, cello pack, rack pack, etc. — all variants that were common in the baseball world in those days), and whether the cards were actually distributed evenly throughout the UK.
The funny thing, of course, is that Topps’ 2021-22 retro cards appears to be more valuable than the old set that their design is based on:
Please let me know if you have any more information on this release, or if you can point me in the right direction.