Oval shaped Baines collecting card, featuring ‘Well Played Fosse’ and a footballer wearing a shirt with chocolate brown and Cambridge blue halves, with white ‘knickers’, with dark ‘stockings’. The card can be dated from the kit to be between 1886 and 1890. In 1890 the Fosse defeated Coalville in the Leicestershire County Cup final in Loughborough. For the next nine years, until 1899, Leicester wore white shirts with black knickers.
Inspired by the commercial success of baseball cards across the Atlantic, Bradford-based businessman John Baines began selling his football cards in 1887 from a carriage that was pulled by a horse with a monkey on its back! Sold in packets of six for a halfpenny, Baines’ cards came in various shapes and covered both professional clubs, like Leicester Fosse, and amateur local teams. Baines organised regular competitions and rewarded those who managed to assemble full sets with a free football jersey. The Baines monopoly didn’t last long, as fellow Bradford businessman W. N. Sharpe introduced his ‘Play Up’ cards to the thriving trading cards market. By the early twentieth century, many companies recognised the cards as a huge marketing opportunity and began producing their own sets. From cigarette and soap manufacturers to newspapers and magazines, football cards became an important sales strategy for many businesses.
Having recognised the collectors’ desire to keep their cards intact, many companies and publishers, like Topical Times, began to produce branded albums to cater for this need.
Trading cards continued to thrive in the post-war era. From the late 1960s Panini and later Merlin released a variety of football sticker collections, trading cards, and card games.
Player trading cards remain a captivating hobby and whether you have hundreds of them, or you’re about to pocket your first one, the message is the same… happy collecting!