2025-26 Panini Donruss Road To World Cup Soccer is finally here after a long wait. The first mention of Donruss had it coming out back in 2025. 2024-25 Donruss Soccer came out back in January 2025 so this is 3 months later. In a year where there wasn’t a ton of new soccer sets coming and it being a World Cup year this really feels like Panini dropping the ball. Especially when you consider all the other major sports card licenses they have lost. Like last year this is a country only product which makes sense since it’s a Road To World Cup product. Unlike last year it only features men which would also seem obvious if not for the fact that Panini included women in the Prizm Monopoly World Cup product. The base checklist goes from 200 last year to 250 this year. The format is mostly the same as past Donruss sets, but there are some changes that make it a little better. See what they are in the breakdown below.
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2025-26 Panini Donruss Soccer Breakdown
Checklist – HERE
Box Makeup – Hobby (Search On Ebay) – 12 packs, 1 Auto, 1 Patch, 3 Optic #’d
Print Run – ~3200 Hobby Cases plus Blasters and International boxes
Soccer Cards HQ Review – 2025-26 Panini Donruss Road To World Cup will be carried by the chance to hit KABOOM! (Search On Ebay) They are once again a case hit and there are numbered Gold /10 and Black 1/1 possible. Kabooms have exploded in value since 2024-25 Donruss came out. The checklist is only 24 players this year instead of 25 in the past. This will mean with the slightly increased print run there will be even more base Kabooms of each player. The checklist is a bit mixed. There are no rookie Kabooms to chase this year. There is the 2nd ever Lamine Yamal Kaboom (Search On Ebay) and his first in a Spain kit. There are also Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, but no Kylian Mbappe or Erling Haaland. There are actually a number of players getting their first Kaboom highlighted by Pele (Search On Ebay) and Ronaldo. There are also oversized Kabooms for the first time this year. I am not sure right now what boxes they will come in, but they won’t be nearly as desirable as the regular sized Kabooms.
The rookie checklist in 2025-26 Donruss Soccer isn’t not going to make the general hobby all that excited but there are some young players that could maybe pan out in the future. The most interesting is Gilberto Mora (Search On Ebay). Not only because he is 17 and Mexican, but with him playing in Liga MX you don’t have to worry about an onslaught of rookies coming in future sets. Well that is until he gets to a league that Topps have the license for and they put out Wookies years from now. Some of the other interesting rookies in here like Shea Charles and Luka Vuskovic already are getting an onslaught of Topps rookies. If you are a country collector, you will appreciate their country rookies. There are some country collectors that are going to be very excited as well. For instance, I know the lads in Ireland have been waiting for a Troy Parrott rookie (Search On Ebay) and they finally get it. It will be interesting to see how many of these rookies end up actually playing in the 2026 World Cup.
The auto checklist is highlighted by Lionel Messi, Lamine Yamal, Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland. There are Ronaldo autos, but as we have become accustomed to no Cristiano Ronaldo autos. If the checklist is to be believed there will be lots of Messi autos (Search On Ebay) to go around. Yamal, Mbappe and Haaland get about half of Messi. The dual autos left a bit to be desired. Donruss is never about the memorabilia cards and I don’t think this year will be any different since it seems like few if any of them are worn.
For the rest of the inserts Animation (Search On Ebay) and Night Moves (Search On Ebay) will be the one that is most chased. The Animation checklist is very strong. If the past is any indication, they won’t be valued in line with their design and rarity which is a bit perplexing to me. Night Moves checklist is solid as well and another one that it seems like would be worth more just based on design and rarity. The rest of the inserts outside of the best Rookie Kings aren’t all that desirable. There are no The Rookies this year. That isn’t the end of the world since they were paper inserts but at least they were rookie cards. Panini did something this year with those other inserts that is sure to make breakers happy though. They upped the amount of numbered parallels from 36 last year to 339 per player. That means there will be way more numbered cards per box this year to tout. Problem is with most of these nobody will truly pay a premium because they’re all undesirable inserts and most you can’t even tell they are numbered.
Panini is pricing 2025-26 Panini Donruss Road To World Cup at $450 per hobby box and quite frankly that seems high to me when comparing it to last year’s Donruss pricing which is about $100 less right now. I don’t think the additional high numbered inserts are enough to move the needle that much. The rookie class is about the same. The increased checklist makes it harder to hit the great players. The Rated Rookie checklist goes up to 50 from 25, but the amount that most collectors will want stays about the same. There are even more SKUs this year with there being hobby and retail blasters. I guess having Yamal and Pele Kabooms is what everyone is banking on. I have seen breaks totaling over $8000 per case which is insane to me for Donruss, but I guess that is where we are at in the cycle. Especially with how hot Kabooms are right now. Thanks to some breakers opening early I got to see some case results, and I didn’t see anything I thought warranted a couple thousand more dollars than last year. As always be careful when buying loose boxes on the secondary market as there is a decent chance the Kaboom has already been hit. If you are getting involved good luck on your Kaboom hunt.
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