I WANT FOOTBALL

Trading Cards of one description or another have been around almost as long as organised, professional football itself. Blank card was first introduced into cigarette packets in the 1870's, initially as a means of providing protection for their addictive contents. By 1876 this idea had evolved into using illustrations for advertising purposes, with this idea taken further to including series of cards so that the smoker would perhaps be more inclined to continue with a particular brand.

In 1887 the Wills Company was the first British outfit to use such cards. Initially they were used to advertise the company's products, but in 1896 they brought out the first set with a sporting theme with a set of 50 cricketers. Wills's first 'football' set was released in 1902 and featured no less than 66 cards, featuring 41 footballers and 25 rugby players, with such luminaries of the day as Steve Bloomer (nr. 9!), William (W.J. or "Fatty") Foulkes (nr. 18), Alex Raisbeck (nr. 24) and Billy Meredith (nr. 37).

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Ogdens Tab Cigarettes Famous Footballers 1908 Everton    £2.00

Crystal Palace H Thoms 1928 cigarette card    £1.99

Aston Villa R Iverson 1938 cigarette card    £1.89

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Ogden's, a Liverpool company, also included cards with their cigarettes and in fact were ahead of Wills with their first set of photographic cards. Their first football set from them was released in 1906 and was called 'Football Club Colours' and featured (in colour) players from the likes of Everton, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Aston Villa. In 1910 Ogden's released another set, this time of football club badges, but it was to be another 16 years before they next issued cards with footballers, this time entitled 'Captains of Association Football Clubs and Colours'.

In the early part of the twentieth century the market in cigarette cards depicting footballers was relatively busy. The aforementioned Wills and Ogden companies were joined by Singleton & Cole (Shrewsbury), Cohen Weenan, Churchman, Lacey's, John Player and Sons, Gallaher's (Belfast and London), Godfrey Phillips, Carreras and others in producing cards featuring the football stars of the day. However, the second world war put paid to the production of such items - ostensibly to save paper (for propganda purposes?)

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Tom Bamford Swansea Town 1939 cigarette card    £.55

Robert Baxter Middlesbrough 1939 cigarette card    £.99

J Pickering Sheffield United 1935 cigarette card    £.99

R Westwood Bolton Wanderers 1935 cigarette card    £.99

J Jackson Chelsea 1935 cigarette card    £.99

A Keeping Fulham 1938 cigarette card    £.99

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Football Trading Card, football cigarette cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.