In 1896, British tobacco firm Marcus & Company produced the earliest trading cards for Association Football. Called “Footballers & Club Colours,” these collectible
cigarette cards included an illustration of a particular player on the front and an
advertisement for the company’s
tobacco on the reverse. The idea was to encourage brand loyalty among football fans who wanted to collect the entire set, and many imitators would follow Marcus & Co. as the game of soccer exploded in popularity across the globe.
Ball-centric sports played using only the feet date back thousands of years, with early evidence for a type of football called Tsu' Chu described in a Chinese military manual from the 3rd century B.C. However, the modern version of soccer evolved in Great Britain between the 8th and 19th centuries, as countless variations of the game were standardized so that teams from different towns or universities could play one another.
England’s original Football Association (FA) formed in 1863, when representatives of 11 clubs and schools voted to formally split the sport from rugby football, whose rules were based on those developed at England’s Rugby School. In contrast, the FA adopted a set of regulations based on the Cambridge Rules, which didn’t allow “hacking,” meaning shin-kicking, or carrying the ball with one’s hands.
Eventually, the sport also became known as soccer—a shortened version of the word “association”—and many more teams joined the FA, thus moving the game well beyond its public-school origins. In less than a decade, the English Football Association included more than 50 member clubs. In 1872, the group held its first major competition, called the FA Cup, and by 1888, league-wide championships had begun.
Meanwhile, the organized sport had spread beyond England, with other associations forming across the British Isles: the Scottish FA was founded in 1873, the Welsh FA in 1875, and the Irish FA in 1880. Soon after, the sport reached mainland...
In 1896, British tobacco firm Marcus & Company produced the earliest trading cards for Association Football. Called “Footballers & Club Colours,” these collectible
cigarette cards included an illustration of a particular player on the front and an
advertisement for the company’s
tobacco on the reverse. The idea was to encourage brand loyalty among football fans who wanted to collect the entire set, and many imitators would follow Marcus & Co. as the game of soccer exploded in popularity across the globe.
Ball-centric sports played using only the feet date back thousands of years, with early evidence for a type of football called Tsu' Chu described in a Chinese military manual from the 3rd century B.C. However, the modern version of soccer evolved in Great Britain between the 8th and 19th centuries, as countless variations of the game were standardized so that teams from different towns or universities could play one another.
England’s original Football Association (FA) formed in 1863, when representatives of 11 clubs and schools voted to formally split the sport from rugby football, whose rules were based on those developed at England’s Rugby School. In contrast, the FA adopted a set of regulations based on the Cambridge Rules, which didn’t allow “hacking,” meaning shin-kicking, or carrying the ball with one’s hands.
Eventually, the sport also became known as soccer—a shortened version of the word “association”—and many more teams joined the FA, thus moving the game well beyond its public-school origins. In less than a decade, the English Football Association included more than 50 member clubs. In 1872, the group held its first major competition, called the FA Cup, and by 1888, league-wide championships had begun.
Meanwhile, the organized sport had spread beyond England, with other associations forming across the British Isles: the Scottish FA was founded in 1873, the Welsh FA in 1875, and the Irish FA in 1880. Soon after, the sport reached mainland Europe and South America, with Denmark and the Netherlands establishing football associations in 1889, followed by New Zealand in 1891; Argentina in 1893; Chile, Switzerland, and Belgium in 1895; Italy in 1898; Germany and Uruguay in 1900; Hungary in 1901, and Finland in 1907. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which translates as the International Federation of Association Football, was founded in Paris in 1904, and the organization held its first World Cup in Montevideo, Uruguay, on 18 July 1930.
Following the card series made by Marcus, several other companies produced similar cigarette cards, including Kinner in 1898; J. F. Bell, F. J. Smith, and W.D. & H.O. Wills in 1902; Percy E. Cadle in 1904; and Singleton & Cole in 1905. As the field of soccer cards widened, the styles also broadened: The 1902 Wills series included black-and-white photographic portraits of football players wearing formal
suits, while a 1906 Ogden series used colorful
illustrations of the men in their full kits or uniforms.
Some of the largest sets of antique football cards were produced by Taddy & Company, whose 1907 series called “Prominent Footballers” included 595 different cards. As the years went on, companies tried to be more inventive to make their soccer cards unique in a crowded field, such as Churchman’s 1914 Footballers series, which featured a black-and-white portrait in an oval inset over a larger colored action scene showing players mid-game.
By the 1920s, collecting and trading football cards was popular enough that tobacco companies began selling albums to hold and display football card collections. In 1927, the London Cigarette Card Company was established to acquire and sell individual soccer cards and complete sets, one of the first stores specifically aimed at trading-card collectors. The business launched its magazine, “Cigarette Card News,” in 1933. However, paper shortages brought on by the beginning of
World War II brought an end to the manufacturing of football tobacco cards.
Following the war, collectible football cards took a different turn, diversifying from the tobacco industry. A&BC Chewing Gum, which was founded in North London in 1949, began including trading cards with its packs of gum in the mid-1950s. In 1954, A&BC created an “All Sports” series, which included 36 cards featuring football players. The company released its first football-specific set in 1958, with 92 cards total, and would continue making soccer trading cards up through 1972. These are often identified by the prominent color used on the backside, such as 1968’s “yellow-backs.”
The American business Topps Chewing Gum had licensed some of its trading cards to A&BC, and after A&BC closed in 1974, Topps began producing its own gum-package football cards. Topps’ first set of soccer cards debuted in 1975, and they produced a yearly series through 1981 with intermittent releases in the decades following.
However, by the 1970s, Topps was facing major competition for its football trading cards from a newer outfit called Panini. Giuseppe Panini had launched Edizione Panini in 1961 in Modena, Italy, with a series of cards featuring Italian soccer players designed to be glued into specially designed albums. The so-called “figurines” or “stickers” were sold in sets of two, encouraging fans to buy and trade as many as possible, and Panini quickly sold millions of copies.
In 1970, Panini expanded its stickers to the global football scene, creating two albums for the World Cup—one featuring Italian players and another for the rest of the world’s soccer stars, which included captions in English, French, and Spanish. Eventually, each Panini series would include stickers showcasing stadiums, mascots, teams, and individual players, all paired with a corresponding album. The 1971 Italian series was the first to use self-adhesive stickers.
Following the international success of the 1970 World Cup edition, Panini opened branches in popular soccer markets across the world and continues to do excellent business with its collectible sticker cards produced for the World Cup. Though rumors have indicated otherwise, Panini always prints an equal number of each card style in a given series.
Many other companies produced vintage soccer cards and stickers in lower volumes throughout during the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, including names like Americana Munchen, the BAB Souvenir Company, Barratt & Co., D.C. Thomson & Co., Esso, FKS Publishers, Monty Gum, Nabisco, Sun Publishing, and Ty-Phoo Tea.
