Breaking news from Topps... FIFA, Fanatics, and Topps have signed a long-term, exclusive collectibles deal covering trading cards, stickers, and trading card games. The partnership officially begins in 2031 and will include both physical and digital collectibles.
That's probably the end of Panini as a global force in the world of football trading cards and stickers.
I feel like the cost of boxes may skyrocket.
ReplyDeleteAwful news for collectors, and at the same time the least surprising news
ReplyDeleteI thought it was coming, but now it's been confirmed, I think it's the absolute worst thing that could happen to our hobby. Personally, I hope Topps/Fanatics over-extend themselves and end up in a real financial mess.
DeleteSadly there are too many gobshite "influencers" and "breakers" for that. They are happy to be pawns in the pockets of these companies if it gets them likes and so the stink spreads
DeleteThe mess Topps made of their Euro 2024 collections finished me off - a sticker album that was virtually impossible to complete due to so many rare gold foil stickers - and then a virtually unpublicised 2 week window hidden away on a quiet corner of their terrible website to order your missing stickers after which they were gone forever, with a minimum order value set at £5 even if you only wanted 1 or 2 stickers. And for the Attax card set there were massive amounts of hard to pull extra cards needed to complete the set (Energy Cards, Black Edge Cards, Hero Cards, Master Cards, Golden Glory, Premium Foil, Platinum Foil, Chrome Shields, Update Card Sets, Mini Tin Exclusives, Mega Tin Exclusives, Limited Editions, Green Parallels, Purple Parallels, Relics, Autos, Golden Treasures, etc.). No way any kid on Earth could get all that lot. Vast amounts of the Attax Euro 24 cards were recalled from the supermarkets a couple of weeks after the Euros ended and Topps were already onto the new Prem season collection. I can only guess that mountains of Euro 24 Attax products ended up in the recycle furnace.
ReplyDeleteAnd now we can look forward to all that - and worse - every 2 years for future Euro and World Cup sticker and card collections. A terrible day for the collecting community :(
Topps won't be publishing update sets for those players who are not going to the world cup
ReplyDeleteSo almost dying in 2020, putting myself in the red multiple times, losing my job a couple of times and other worse crap couldn't stop me from collecting, but I think this will definitely will.
ReplyDeleteI hope they go bankrupt, but I know they won't, as long as you'll have brain-dead dumbasses to hunt for the goat or the siuuu or whatever. Buying hundreds of the same sloppily packaged cards in hopes of striking gold.
The thing that annoys me most about Topps isn't them buying exclusive rights to everything under the sun ( although it's a huge issue), but the fact that they pump out bullshit collection after bullshit collection that nobody can and will complete. It's disgraceful.
Yep, totally agree with what everybody has said. I'll never collect any Topps card set again and they will destroy the WC collections when they get their hot little hands on them. Prices will probably double and the sticker collection will be riddled with parallels and hard to find and expensive rubbish.
DeleteI'm finding that there are fewer and fewer collections these days that I can go at with a reasonable expectation that I can finish the collection. Next season, there are maybe 4 collections that I'll bother with.
Maybe Panini are better off getting out of WC collections. These tournaments are becoming so overblown and diluted and the sets they are spawning are becoming so huge that they are becoming hard to complete even now. This current one - I'll wait a few years and then try and get a complete set of the stickers.
The problem with Topps/Fanatics is they are a massive company who make their money in the US. They don't care about the UK/European market and seemingly make very little effort to produce quality products. It's all Hobby boxes that people buy and then put on a shelf for 10 years and then sell on at a profit.
Our hobby is dying anyway, kids are put off by the high prices and the collection sizes and are not buying this stuff. There are still some good collections out there - but very few of them are produced by Topps.