Soccer Cards Desperately Need Upper Deck's Touch

Originally posted on 12 January 2012.

Upper Deck has a bit of a shady history with past incidents ranging from their production of counterfeit yu-gi-oh cards to unauthorized baseball cards as well as the Beckham "error" autographs from 2010 World of Sports. Despite these troubles as far as I'm concerned they generally produce the best quality trading cards of any manufacturer around. Unfortunately at the moment the only soccer license UD hold is with MLS. Obviously for collectors that's not the most attractive league around, however in terms of card content, collectibility and quality UD's MLS offerings are vastly superior to the garbage TCG products from Panini and Topps (who both have the trading card rights to all major football leagues and competitions around the World). Just take a look at what's available on eBay from Panini and Topps.

Both Panini and Topps have actually released nice looking higher-end products within the last year, Panini with their Premium Champions League set and Topps' Authentics Premier League brand but unfortunately these types of products lack high end cards of the top players that everyone wants as well as being very poorly marketed and distributed, (Topps Authentics is a direct order only product) not to mention these collections seem to be an afterthought for both manufacturers. UD on the other hand produced some of the better collections ever seen with their excellent Manchester United collections among several others. I for one sorely miss UD's presence in the market of international football cards and hope they can soon get back into the global game.