2023-24 Topps UEFA Club Competitions is here to mark the beginning of the 2023-24 Topps major soccer card hobby club team releases. There have been on demand sets so earlier this year that gave us some clues of what was to come for UEFA club cards this year. Now that we have a checklist we have a much better idea. The 200 card base checklist has lots of rookies as we have come to expect in Topps products. There are plenty of autos and various degrees of short prints to give you something to look for. Let’s see what you can expect.
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2023-24 Topps UEFA Club Competitions Details
Checklist – HERE
Box Makeup – Hobby (Search On Ebay) – 24 packs, 1 Auto or Relic, 1 Silver pack which contains 4 Chrome cards, 3 Pink Sparkle, 5 Starball, ~3 # cards
Blaster (Search On Ebay) – 1 Commemorative Starball Relic
Print Run – Not known yet as Topps hasn’t released the odds. I’m guessing over 5000 hobby cases + blasters.
Rookie Breakdown – Check out the 2023-24 Topps UEFA Rookie Cards breakdown.
Soccer Cards HQ Review – Topps has not released the odds based on the time of writing this so I don’t have exact numbers, but I have seen enough box breaks to have a decent idea of box makeup and now that there will be plenty for everyone that wants it. We also now have a couple of years of Topps paper to go off as far as where values end up.
There has been plenty of excitement around this checklist and while it is good I am not sure it’s as great as some have been hyping. It does have a decent rookie class, but Topps missed out on Ethan Nwaneri and Oscar Bobb again which I don’t quite understand. Vitor Roque also didn’t make it which is more understandable based on when he signed. Lamine Yamal (Search On Ebay) is the chase of the set and the fact that he does have autos will greatly help the set. While there will be a lot of excitement around his cards and autos just know he is going to have a ton of rookies when all is said and done. There are also some promising rookies flying under the radar but with the season winding down there isn’t much reason to pile into paper cards of them right now.
Topps has added more Chrome cards into the set this year. We saw The Grail Topps Chrome cards make their debut last year with Erling Haaland being featured. If you haven’t read this article I did on how the supply and demand of that card was fascinating I recommend it. This year The Grail returns with Cristiano Ronaldo being the choice. Card #6 (Search On Ebay) is in this set and it is a Real Madrid card. Topps has announced the first 6 people to complete The Grail set of all 9 cards will win a prize with the first to complete winning 2 tickets to the 2024-25 Champions League Finals. There are only 50 of each this year compared to 100 last year.
This year there are Chrome Mojo (Search On Ebay) cards which claim to be a case hit. There are only 30 cards in the Chrome Mojo checklist so it is not nearly as short print as it could’ve been. There is also one Silver Pack in each hobby box. Those packs includes 4 Topps Chrome which are all Ultimate Stage cards from what I have seen so far. Some of those can be numbered or autos.
Speaking of autos one of the newest additions this year is Allen & Ginter on-card autographs (Search On Ebay). I was very interested to see who Topps used for this checklist since the baseball product includes subjects from all over not just baseball. For this release they did stick to all soccer subjects but not all are players. It seems one of the biggest chases is going to be Kate Abdo. Mia Hamm gets her 2nd Topps auto ever with her first being in 2007 Allen & Ginter. I have confirmed that a different card was in fact used this year although it would have been hilarious if it hadn’t. As has become normal Topps puts a big chase in this set as well. It is a Jude Bellingham on-card 1/1 auto with the inscription “Just a boy from Birmingham” on it. We do not know what other non A&G on-card autos if any will be in here. The Official UCL Draw Card Autos are back this year. These cards seem so cool in theory but as we saw last year the execution left something to be desired. I guess it’s kind of hard to make a draw card work with a small sticker auto. If they managed to get these signed on-card they would be great collectibles. I did find it odd that they used Kaka and Rivaldo on the Official Draw Cards which seems like current players would make more sense.
The legend auto checklist is pretty stacked with Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid), Ronaldo Nazario (Inter Milan), Zinedine Zidane (Real Madrid) and Lionel Messi (Barcelona). CR7 and Messi being in Madrid and Messi are favorable. I wonder if the trend of player autos from cards that don’t match their current team or after their career not being as valuable that occurs in other sports will carry over to soccer. If the Lionel Messi are on-card as we have become accustomed to that will matter a lot less.
There are short print, super short print and ultra short print variations in 2023-24 Topps UEFA Club Competitions. Topps has made it a little easier to identify the super short print SSP by putting SSP big in Gold on the back of the cards instead of having to look at the fine print code. I am not sure what they are doing for the ultra short print Cristiano Ronaldo that is in here.
There is a lot to like about the checklist. There is just one big problem. It’s a paper set and we are going to be seeing a lot of these cards in Chrome as well as most every Topps set this year. At 1 auto or relic, and there are more autos than relics, and 3 # cards these will be a reasonable fun cheap rip. I expect most people opening will be doing so in hopes of being able to sell the cards for more, not necessarily to hold. These paper cards usually become a game of hot potato until a new and better set comes out. There are 1288 # parallels of each player which is way too much to make anything but the lowest numbered investible. The cards that can retain some value are the team cards or some of the inserts that don’t carry over into chrome. For instance, if Historic Hat Tricks don’t make it into chrome some of those # could be collectible as they are pretty cool cards.
At $75/hobby box it’s a reasonably priced enough where waiting to rip isn’t as big of a worry as other products. Maybe it falls a few dollars as time goes on but not enough to cause regret. There’s also enough of this where it shouldn’t go up too much. If it does stay away. After a few years of playing around with their pricing Topps seems to have mostly got it right on this one.
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