1977 Crack Maradona Rookie Discussion
 

OK, So I have now received emails from 5 different people THIS WEEK about Maradona cards. Hopefully this is not due his terrible antics at the World Cup, but instead his success on the pitch. I have long thought that the 1977 Maradona card and the two Pele rookies (ALFA and Quigol) will end up being some of the most desired soccer cards. Therefore, I have accumulated a bunch of copies over the past 5 years. I am attaching 10 of my favorite copies. Since I have received questions, I figured that I would just post my thoughts.

1. There is A LOT of variation on the coloring and cutting of these "pog" cards. Check out the differnce between the SGC 30 and the SGC 84 below. Looks like Trump before and after the tanning salon!
2. Most will have some visible "notches" where the pogs were once attached to a more full piece of cardboard
3. If the printing was slightly off, it tended to mean that part of the border prints in white (not yellow) - this is NOT PAPER LOSS and is akin to being slight off center
4. There are some cards that have some seriously fuzzy photos of him. I prefer to avoid these cards, but they may not affect the grade (if the copy is graded by a TPG)
5. Most lower grade examples are such as they have been removed from albums and have some small paper loss on the backs - which many times is hard to distinguish
6. There are some of these cards that come on the market that look to have been soaked in water (trying to get off the albums?) and that tends to fade the coloring to the point where they are pretty undesirable (to me at least)
7. I have noticed a huge disparity in the PSA copies which I do not completely understand based on the scans that I have seen and basically am avoiding acquiring any PSA copies of this card at this time.

Anyway, I hope that this explains some of my thoughts with respect to the 1977 Diego Maradona Futbol Rookie Disc.

10 of your favorite? How many do you have? XD

Yeah, I’ve seen those PSA copies from that guy in the UK. Really bad toning on the images. I would have loved to buy one otherwise.

Let me know if any of those are available!

Not really available...
 

Really just holding for the long run on these... I do have a couple on eBay, but as I said, I feel that these are pretty undervalued right now. Given that the Pele cards took off, wouldn't it be logical that this would be the next card to take flight? It does to me.

Amazing group. The PSA 5 on ebay is really awful, just took a look.

Psa
 

agree... to me that is a PSA 2 at best... I notice that PSA has been giving pretty high grades for some soccer cards lately, which is surprising. For now I am staying away from the PSA graded Maradona discs. That is just me, though.

Holy cow Batman! How many of these discs do you have? How long have you been adding them to your inventory?

CORRECTION: ALL of them should have notches on them. I would stay away from those that are smooth all the way around.

PSA doesn't know how to grade South American soccer cards because they have handled very few of them. Take a look at the attached images below. The example on the left was purchased by me recently. It looks stunning, and yet it only received a grade of 5 EX. Now take a look at the one on the right - it got a PSA 6! How the #$@&%*! does that make any sense? Is it even real? I am seriously thinking of contacting Joe Orlando about this.

Agree
 

You are correct that ALL should have the notches but sometimes they come off "cleaner" so that they are hardly noticeable - other times they are border line distracting. On close inspection, you should be able to see where they were.

As I mentioned previously, I would prefer any of the 10 copies that I posted above over the PSA example that you just posted.

To answer the other questions, I have been ACTIVELY pursuing these cards for roughly 5-6 years. Beyond the ones that I show here, I have another 5-6 which are ungraded, including the few low grade, but good eye appeal copies that I have on eBay.