History of Football Card Collecting and Types of Football Cards
December 28th 2007
Football Card Collecting, as you are aware, is an age old hobby that has kept many game lovers totally connected with all aspects of the sport and with their favorite players. As a sport, Football is perhaps the most loved in the U.S. In fact, the Super Bowl is something akin to an undeclared holiday for many of us.
Popularity of any game is always marked by its players and their records and there is no better way to keep in touch with the players then by collecting football cards. History has it that sports cards were first introduced by tobacco companies who used player cards as their hook to increase sales of their products! Later on, of course, tobacco products were replaced by gum and it was only past the Second World War that companies were set up that actually sold football cards as collectibles.
The first company to actually sell player cards was Bowman, way back in 1948. Topps was the second company to be established in 1951 and they took over Bowman and became the sole ruler of the player cards market till very recently. Companies like Upper Deck, Donruss and Fleer, entered the market much later, some time after the early 1980s. Ever since, there has been a big boom in the business of player cards and football cards, with each company vying with the other to create the cards an avid football card collector should have in their card collection.
If you are new to the football card collecting hobby, then it often becomes a daunting task to decide what to collect and how. Well, there are basically four categories of cards that you can collect, namely, rookie cards, singles, complete sets and unopened sets. A Rookie is the 1st card produced for a player per brand. Each card company or card brand will have their own rookie cards for each player. Today a player can have upwards of 100 Rookie cards! But that was not always the case. Unopened sets is visual treat for football card art collectors. Each football card has an allure of its own that is unmatchable. Singles are just that, single cards. You can use FootballCardChase.com to find singles of football players.