Football Cards and Stickers — An Obsession
To be fair, I have had a lot of obsessions over the years. Fanatical collecting of items. Some have lasted a lifetime, others a few weeks. There has been a lot of money spent. There still is. I can’t go anywhere without getting a guidebook, a fridge magnet, a pen, and some postcards. I’ve had difficulty finding enough storage space for all the records and books at various times. But none of those collecting obsessions were as manic, or got me into as much trouble as the one about football cards and stickers.
The clarity of memories I have around them is astounding as well. Something that has been active in my brain this season. As part of the match reports I have been doing for the Crawley Town games have included a throwback spot to the cards and stickers of yesteryear, relating to the opposing sides we have been playing.
The most deep-rooted card and sticker memories relate to the latter half of the 1970s, and in particular Topps football cards. In particular, the five playing card size series they did from the 1974–75 season through to the 1978–79 season.
It wasn’t really until I hit junior school in 1977 that I got into them. But once in junior school they were everywhere. Going into the playground, before school, at breaks, at lunch. In every little alcove, every wall space around the playground had boys, crouched down playing games with football cards.
Flicking them from between their fingers towards the wall in one of three common games. Toppsies — where the object was to get your card to land on top of any of the cards already thrown, whoever did it first got all the cards down on the ground. Knocksies — where a number of cards from each player were leant up against the wall, and they had to be knocked down, whoever knocked the last one down won all the cards on the ground. Closest to the wall — each kid would flick a set number of cards to get them as close to the wall as possible. The closest won all the other cards. There were rules and variations to each game. But to get involved you had to have some cards in the first place.
The first pack of football cards. The shop was just around the corner at the top of my street on the main road. A little convenience store. But it was closer that Pat’s Newsagents (which I will return to), and it sold the cards. I had the five pence piece in my hand, hot now, as I had been holding it so tightly, so I didn’t lose it in the two minutes the walk to the shop took. I picked up the packet from the box full of them on a low shelf just inside the door. At child’s eye level, a deliberate ploy I would suppose now. I carried the packet to the counter and reached up and placed it on there, and handed over the five pence piece. Then I took the packer and sprinted home, straight down the entry, through the gate, in the back door and up the stairs to my bedroom. And I started to open the packet.
What wonderous things those packets were. Wax wrapped packs in bright colours with the words Topps Footballers on the front of them. And once unwrapped there was the little rectangular piece of pink bubble gum, and then underneath that six cards. That first bought pack was the tail end of stock from the 1976–77 set, what are now colloquially known as red backs. Due to the predominately shades of red on the back of the cards, where it would have the name and details about the player, a little stats section of the games played and goals scored by them each season, and a little pink bit with a random football fact in it illustrated with a cartoon. The front would have a coloured outline, and at the bottom there would be the players name and the team they played for in vivid colours, with the main part of the front being a picture of the player, some of them were action shots, but most were a close up head and shoulders shot, or a frighteningly large head shot. Some of the pictures were frightening in their own right. My brother naming the one of Manchester City’s Dave Watson ‘monkey face’.
With the packet open and the bubble gum already in my mouth and being chewed I looked at that first pack of cards. Six footballers I pristine condition, sharp edges, pointed corners, shiny fronts, no little creases. Nothing like the ones I had seen in the playground at school, where they were scuffed and worn and softened from handling, play, and general misuse.
I had hoped for an international star to be included, or one of the team leader cards, but there were none of those ‘specials’ just six players. Of teams I didn’t care much about. Birmingham City, Coventry City, Norwich City, weren’t there some of those teams in every pack. Probably Everton, some random lower league team like Oldham Athletic, and it wouldn’t be a surprise for the other to be Manchester City, just not Dave Watson. None of my team — Tottenham Hotspur, and none of interest to others which might have had trade value from one of the three main supported clubs at school, Leicester City, Liverpool, and Manchester United. The lure of having cards, and there not being many Tottenham ones in that set tempted me to switch alliances, and change to a team which had a lot of cards. That might have become a disaster if I had followed it through, I’d have ended up following the hell that is Birmingham City.
But this was to be the first of many packs. The first that led into that dangerous obsession for me. I was hooked from the outset.
Having some cards meant I was able to join in with the games. And I found I wasn’t bad at flicking cards. In fact I was surprisingly good — certainly for a newbie, and certainly in my year group. I won more games than I lost, and a collection grew. But it soon became apparent that the collection was never going to be enough for me. There was always going to be the need to have more cards.
The 1977–78 set were the orange backs. The 1976–77 set had obviously been a success for Topps as for the 1977–78 set they expanded from the 330 cards the last two years sets had had, up to 396. And it seemed you could get that year’s packs everywhere.
There were suspicions as home about the volume of cards I was accumulating. I didn’t get a lot of pocket money as an eight-year-old. And the five pence a pack would have meant I could have got about four packs a week. Even my skills as a card flicker couldn’t really cover the increase in cards. I had developed a knack for petty theft as well.
Nowadays the packs of cards are placed away from stray children’s hands, behind counters, or on higher shelves in staff eyeline, or even locked away. Back in the seventies they would be down near the floor underneath the racks of papers and magazines or other goods, and they would be out of sight from the counter at the back of the store, and near the front door. There wasn’t even any mirrors for shopkeepers to be checking in either. You could bend down and pick some up and shove them in a pocket as you walked out past them. And I did.
But that wasn’t to be my only source. Especially not when I also found the joy of stickers as well.
The 1978 World Cup was to blame for that one. A little booklet and various countries worth of players to fill the pages. It wasn’t the Panini set which were proper stickers. To be honest, calling them stickers may have been stretching it somewhat, these were made by FKS, and they were more like mahoosive stamps and had to be wetted to stick them into the book. There was no England at the World Cup that year, but it didn’t stop them having England players included in the set. Scotland were there, and for a strange reason, the most memorable team to me was Tunisia.
It probably wasn’t only me who was a bit obsessed. But as the years went on and I moved up a year at school, I found the kids in my year didn’t really want to play a card shark like I had become, and so I ended up against older kids. I could hold my own against most of them, but had a nemesis in Nick Ellul, and lost quite badly a few times. I got crazy about it as well. And having lost I would need to replenish cards. I got into a habit of needing to go to the toilet during classes, not because I needed to go, but because they were in the cloakrooms, and I could ransack the pockets of coats in there for any cards left behind.
I did that for a while but got caught out by having some quite distinctive older A&BC cards in my desk. I had the lid of the desk open as a classmate was walking past and he noticed them in there and recognised them as his ones which had gone missing. Which put paid to my cloakroom sessions. I said I had found them on the floor, and that couldn’t be proved either way, but I was a watched man at school.
Even so, I still couldn’t help myself, I would find an excuse to have to go back into other rooms when at friends’ houses so that I might get a few seconds to snaffle some cards from the collections they had lying around. I got caught doing that eventually too. But the obsession wouldn’t let go. If I had lost all the cards in a day, I would get someone to lend me a card before I went home. I would use that to play other kids in the neighbourhood and win some cards off them, so I had some to play with the next day. I did it one evening, borrowed a card, went out to locals, and won about thirty, went into school and lost them all before registration apart from one old tatty one which was what the loaner got back.
My obsession drove my mum mad, so much so that she had warned me about not having any cards or stickers with me, or mentioning them at my speech therapy sessions. But I had been at school, and had been playing in the playground, and had a load of cards in my pockets. And so when the therapist had listened to me trying very hard to say ‘seven sissling sausages’ over and over again, she (I can remember it being a woman, with glasses which covered most of her forehead) asked if there was anything else I could try reading out. I’m sure she was expecting me to get a schoolbook out and read from that, but no, I fished into my pockets and pulled out a little pile of football cards, and went through them picking out the ones with names beginning with S’s in them. Steve Heighway, Stewart Houston, Gordon Smith, come to mind now. And I was doing well, until my mum came back into the room and saw me with the cards and bellowed, ‘what did I tell you about those ruddy cards?’
But before the end of junior school football cards and stickers had been banned from the school. Some of the games had gotten out of hand. There were disputes, poor losers, and fights started breaking out. I’d probably caused some of that along the way.
At the shop, I had grown cocky. I would go past the shelf with the cards and stickers on the way in. I would be in the shop most days, getting papers for my parents or cigarettes for my grandparents. I would pick up a great wodge of packets of stickers and shove them in my pocket before I got up to the counter.
On the day in question I had done the same as normal, only to find to my horror that the trousers I had on had no pockets, there was nowhere for me to stuff the packets. I was getting nearer to the counter and panic started to set in. I thought that just holding them against my crotch with one hand would do the trick. However this wasn’t as smooth as I might have imagined. The woman of the lovely couple who ran Pat’s Newsagents asked what I had in my hand. I put the pile of sticker packets on the counter. She asked if I had the money for them and I said no. I took the paper I’d been sent for and left the shop.
My mum had obviously been in the shop the next day, as when I got home from school I was confronted with an angry mother. I was dragged back to Pat’s and made to stand outside the shop for the next hour wearing a homemade cardboard sign that read.
“I AM A THIEF”
I was also banned from buying or having football stickers. The ban was indefinite. I tried circumventing it by jointly doing a sticker collection with my friend Ambrose. He would have the album and stickers at his house. Only for me to find out he just slung them in a box and didn’t put anything in the album. he had been done for my own good, as he was one of those I had tried to steal cards off at his house years before.
I was also buying stickers again before the end of the year. They weren’t football ones. There was a Formula 1 sticker album out that year. I argued successfully that the ban was for football cards and stickers only. I finished the F1 collection, and didn’t steal a single packet. I may have bought a few more than my weekly limit, but by the end my obsession had been wound back a bit, even if my brother had landed me in it as I’d get him to take the extra packets into the house with him and he told my mum about it.
The other loophole was a new sideline obsession of Top Trumps, there were plenty of football sets of them, and Top Trumps were considered completely differently, so I got my football card fix slightly differently.
By the time I got to senior school, the ban on me owning cards and stickers had been lifted, and card flicking games were allowed there. And with Nick Ellul having gone to a different senior school I was back in the swing of being able to win lots of cards off other kids. But that didn’t last long as before the end of the first year they had been banned there as well. More fights and disputes, but nothing to do with me this time.
The playing card size sets had stopped, and the 1979–80 and 1980–81 sets were one third size and less cards, and not ones you could flick. And then in 1981 they stopped all together. At that point it was just the Panini stickers available, and although I’d get some, getting a full set of over five hundred wasn’t going to happen, and they weren’t quite as interesting as the cards. Well, to me anyway.
By 1985 I had two carrier bags of cards which only saw the light of day occasionally. And in a fit of lunacy I gave them all away to Justin Shuttleworth at my brother’s birthday party that year. And for eighteen months I had no cards.
Only to see a load of random ones in a little tin box in a second-hand shop on the entrance to Birnbeck Pier whilst on holiday to Weston-Super-Mare. Fifty of them for twenty pence. I bought all of them I could, and then spent the next six months buying back all the cards I had given away at a penny a card.
Over the years it has been a continuous tale of boom and bust. Of me building up collections and then selling them off, either for the space, or because I needed the money. Only for me to buy them back again. After cards had disappeared for most of the eighties, they came back in the 1989–90 season, and for a few years there were Proset and Stadium Club to collect.
Then a gap again, and then Match Attax and the return of Topps came with the noughties and explosion of Premier League Merchandise. I’ve dabbled in all of them, and have also gone back and had A&BC card sets going back to the late fifties, cigarette cards, Barratts candy cards, the Sun Soccercards, FKS, but they come and go. What remains a mainstay now is those five Topps sets. 1,672 cards.
I am a lot calmer about them all now. There is definitely no rifling through pockets, people’s houses, or wholesale theft from shops now. I see them in second hand shops, antique shops, charity shops. I pick them up and want to take them to the counter, only to remember I don’t need to, I have them. Nicely stored away in card wallets and full collections. Let them be.
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