Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Al, as someone who is an outsider here, it seems to me that except perhaps among very hard-core collectors/fans there isn't much interest in soccer cards or the history of the sport itself pre-Pele. That seems to differentiate soccer from baseball where (except perhaps with the very latest generation) everyone is somewhat familiar with the greats of the game from the turn of the century on. Maybe I'm just projecting my own outlook, but I have talked to several guys who buy some soccer cards and they pretty much feel the same way. So I am not sure a pre-war soccer card is really a meaningful equivalent to the Wagner. Just my .02 which I would discount at least to .01.
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There is significant interest in the history of soccer and certainly pre-Pele. There are countless high quality soccer museums, albeit they tend to be club or national specific. However, it is true that most of the icons of the game are from post-World War Two onwards and, other than historians, few could name any pre-World War One Stars with soccer history typically being well documented from the 1920s or so.
Culturally, it is a very different sport to baseball. There is much less interest in game statistics (a good thing IMO, although statistical overload has crept in over the past two decades) and very few traditional soccer fans could ever, nor would want to, understand the US “franchise” model. The migration of the Dodgers and Giants from NYC to the west coast simply could not happen in soccer - if, for example, an owner tried to relocate Manchester United to London or Internazionale from Milan to Rome, there’d be civil unrest to an extent that the league would become unmanageable.
However, from a collecting perspective, I believe the key difference is that cards are much less intrinsic to soccer culture than in baseball. For example, Gallaher was a large tobacco company formed in the north of Ireland (what would later become Northern Ireland). Certainly in the 1910s and 1920s, they were prolific issuers of cards of Irish (and English / Scottish) soccer players - they would presumably have been obtained by grandparents and great-grandparents of many soccer fans here in Northern Ireland but, although I know many collectors of soccer memorabilia here, few are interested in cards nor do I know of any who have an emotional attachment to cards based on their prior family generations having built up collections - albeit many were clearly retained as they are easy to purchase today in good condition.