Cashing In On Spain's Historic Dominance

Little less than a week ago Spain were crowned 2012 European champions in impressive fashion after defeating Italy with a resounding 4-0 scoreline. After their latest conquest there's now even talk of this Spain team being the greatest national side of all time and at the center of Spain's historic success has been the UEFA Player of the Tournament, 'Don' Andrés Iniesta.

Recently I came accross this auction for an extremely scarce Iniesta Panini autograph. This is one of only two certified autos he has out there, mind you I'm not counting any dubious Futera autos he may have. Apparently the card ended up selling for ¥74,500 (see below) which at the current conversion rate from yen to dollars, comes out to nearly $1,000 USD!

2002 Panini World Cup (Japanese Edition) 5 Box Break

I recently picked up several boxes of this older Panini World Cup collection and as you can see from this side of the box picture (click on image to enlarge) this is the more rare and complete Japanese version of the product which has a deeper checklist than it's counterpart released in Europe and around the rest of the World.

Also of particular interest is that this Japanese set had product exclusive autograph cards of 12 different players with a print run of 100 each, see checklist below.

A1    Ronaldo - Brazil /100
A2    Lilian Thuram - France /100
A3    Igor Tudor - Croatia /100
A4    Gianluigi Buffon - Italy /100
A5    Paolo Maldini - Italy /100
A6    Francesco Totti - Italy /100
A7    Christian Vieri - Italy /100
A8    Nakata Hidetoshi - Japan /100
A9    Ono Shinji - Japan /100
A10   Yanagisawa Atsushi - Japan /100
A11   Rui Costa - Portugal /100
A12   Álvaro Recoba - Uruguay /100

- Check this thread over on FCF (Football Cards Forum) for the complete collection checklist. -

So I busted 5 of these boxes over the last 3 days hopeful of pulling an auto but realizing that with only 1,200 signed cards to be found it was probably going to be quite unlikely. I'm guessing the majority have already been pulled and are now tucked away in collector's private collections. With that in mind I would settle for completing as much of the rest of the master set which includes two other chase card sets to collect, 'Flag Player' foil inserts and 'Japan National Team Players' special cards.

Now on to the results:

Box 1 - From this first box the "hits" I pulled were a F12 Augustine "Jay-Jay" Okocha, F13 José Luis Chilavert and J1, J2, J3 & J23 Japanese player inserts.

Box 2 - This box produced F1 Émile, F19 Álvaro Recoba, F20 Earnie Stewart, J5, J7, J11 and J12.

Box 3 - From this one I got F4 Jon Dahl Tomasson, F5 Oliver Kahn, F6 Zinedine Zidane, J7, J11 and J12. Curiously all of the 'J' inserts in this box were duplicates from the last box, poor collation...

Box 4 - This box was definitely the most productive. To my pleasant surprise it was quite loaded with some packs even contaning 2 hits! Which were F8 Francesco Totti, F9 Nakata Hidetoshi, F10 Hong Myung-Bo, F11 Juan Francisco Palencia, J18, J19, J20, J21 and J22.

Box 5 - Unfortunately in this box all of the hits, save for one 'J' insert, were dupes that I had pulled in earlier boxes. F5 Kahn, F6 Zidane, J7, J9, J11 and J12.

Update - I ended up opening up a sixth box in hopes of getting closer to completing the inserts sets but alas no luck. All of the hits were dupes, in fact this box #6 was almost the same as box #4. As for the hits, F9 Nakata, F10 Hong, F11 Palencia, J20, J21 and J22.

Here are the scans of the hits from the entire bust. Notice at the bottom the Roberto Baggio and Eto'o base cards, these were probably the biggest names to be entirely omitted from the European realese that were indeed included in this Japanese edition.

Hope yous all enjoyed the pics and break, overall I have to say it was very enjoyable for me. Solid product.

2012 Topps USA Olympics

A little over two weeks ago Topps launched it's 2012 London Olympics trading card collection which focuses on US hopefuls, among them a few soccer players. The women's autograph lineup consists of Alex Morgan, Hope Solo and Abby Wambach. Juan Agudelo is the sole men's inclusion in the entire checklist which is actually surprising considering the US national team failed to qualify for the tournament.

The women's autos are selling very well as expected with Alex Morgan's autos being white hot but I personally would've liked to have seen Topps go beyond the US athletes and obtain the signatures of some of the top footballers expected to be part of the games, the likes of Neymar, Chicharito Hernández, Gareth Bale, etc. It also bears mentioning that Panini has also released an Olympic product, which focuses on the British contingent. Unfortunately though it's the typical Panini "Adrenalyn" garbage, not even worth a further mention.

First Ever SCB Box Break

To be honest there's just not that many contemporary unopened soccer products out there worth opening so I mainly stick to buying only the singles I want. However I do sometimes pick up a box from an older collection I'm interested in, especially if the price is right as was the case with my recently busted 36 pack box of 1994 Upper Deck Wold Cup.

I had yet to pick up this preview edition World Cup set so this was a great chance to add it to my WC sets collection. Here's the breakdown of the "hits" from my box break as pictured in the scan below. I got 4 different "Bora Selects" inserts which the back of the pack states that the odds of finding these is 1:12 packs. Next I got 2 SP "Honorary Captain" inserts (1:24 odds) including Michael Jordan. Lastly I got 6 (3 not pictured) "World Cup Super Star Holograms" inserts. I have heard that these hologram cards were originally meant to be stickers and it makes sense because they are much thinner than the rest of the cards and very flimsy, still nice looking cards though plus I absolutely smashed the odds on these as they're stated odds are only 1:18 buit I got 6 in 36 packs!

As a result of this fun and dirt cheap break I now have the complete base set for my PC and a spare one to trade, as well as the entire Hologram insert set. I still need plenty of inserts especially the Bora and SSP Honorary Captains so if anyone out there has 'em I'd be interested in trading for them.