page_title: Association football trading card
section_title: Modern era
hierarchical_section_title: Association football trading card / History / Modern era
caption_attribution_description: English: Pele trading card by Panini, from the "Mexico 70" series. ("Pele 1970 Panini Mexico 70 Bisvalida Back PELE BVG 4.5")
context_page_description: An association football trading card is a type of trading card relating to association football, usually printed on cardboard, silk, or plastic. These cards feature one or more players, clubs, stadiums, or trophies. Football cards are most often found in Europe, Asia and South America.
  Some notable producing companies include Panini Group and Topps.
context_section_description: Italian company Panini started to produce football cards in 1961, when the company released a collection set about Serie A. Since then, Panini has been producing football cards until consolidating as the world's leading manufacturer.
  In 1970 Panini began publishing L'almanacco Illustrato del Calcio Italiano (The Illustrated Guide to Italian Football), after purchasing the rights from publishing house Carcano. Panini also published its first FIFA World Cup sticker album for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, in addition to using multilingual captions and selling stickers outside of Italy for the first time. Initiating a craze for collecting and trading stickers, Panini's stickers were an instant hit, with The Guardian stating in the UK "the tradition of swapping duplicate [World Cup] stickers was a playground fixture during the 1970s and 1980s". Another first for Panini, in the early 1970s, was introducing self-adhesive stickers, as opposed to using glue.
  In Spain, the first collection released by Panini was the 1974 World Cup album. The Spanish market introduced digital collections when Stampii, an internet company established in 2009, released one year later its first set of digital trading cards. Collectors were allowed to acquire sets or share their collections only through the web.
  In the United States, Upper Deck (established in 1988), released a series for the 1994 World Cup featuring several sports personalities that promoted the competition. The same company launched several collections after a deal with Major League Soccer (MLS) in the 2000s. Another US company, Pacific Trading Cards, produced MISL/indoor soccer cards in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, Pro Set was licensor of the English Premier League for its football cards of 1990–91. Wizards Of The Coast also had a brief stint producing Premier League players cards in 2001–02.
  Asian manufacturers include Futera, a United Arab Emirates company established in 1989 that got licenses of some of the most notable English clubs.
  In May 2006, Panini partnered with The Coca-Cola Company and Tokenzone to produce the first virtual sticker album for the 2006 World Cup. The album was viewable in at least 10 different languages, such as Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. For the 2014 World Cup, three million FIFA.com users took part in the Panini Digital Sticker Album contest. Panini developed an app for the 2018 World Cup where fans could collect and swap virtual stickers. Five million people gathered digital stickers for the 2018 World Cup.
  During the 2018 World Cup, Panini produced an average of 8 and 10 million card packages per day. In 2018, Panini signed a deal with English Premier League to produce cards under license since the 2019–20 season.
caption: Pelé trading card from the Mexico 70 series, Panini's first FIFA World Cup collection
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