Football Cards
Collecting things is a common hobby: for some it is stamps, while for others it might have been train numbers, but for football fans in the past (especially young boys) the main item was collecting football cards. In fact, the origins of this practice lay in baseball, where pictures of star players were included with products such as bubble gum and tobacco to help with sales.
A company called A&BC began producing football cards in the UK during the 1950s, with pictures and potted biographies of star players. Then England managed to win the World Cup in 1966 and football fever swept the nation, making football card collecting very popular in playgrounds and street corners across the land.
This was followed by Topps Cards, who bought up A&BC and distributed their cards in chewing gum packets. This became the Pokemon collection of its age, with top teams and players much sought after and endless amounts of gum consumed in the hunt for, say, Nottingham Forest instead of Birmingham City.
It has to be remembered that unless you were lucky enough to live within reach of a major team’s ground, opportunities for watching professional level football were severely limited. Television pictures were black and white and very grainy, while only a few major matches like the FA Cup Final were even televised, so card collecting was one way of somehow participating.
Today, these original football cards have become commercially traded collectables while sticker albums have generally replaced them for a new generation of football fans. This surely has to be good news for the bubble gum-free pavements and seating of the UK.
