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The Sun's first ever set of football cards, a set of coloured
drawings given away, I think, with tokens from the newspaper. The
cards came as part of a sheet, with all 22 cards in a long strip
format with two side by side portraits by eleven cards underneath.
The cards are actually ordered by club alphabetically in the strip. |
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In early 1970 the Sun produced a Souvenir Wallchart (price 1/-)
in anticipation of the 1970 Mexico City World Cup. The chart had
spaces for a number of stickers, which you ordered from the Sun. The
stickers were: Great British players of the past (22 stickers),
Flags of World Cup Nations (16 stickers),
Stars of previous World Cups (16 stickers),
England's squad for Mexico (28 stickers). You sent away to
the Sun on an application form for each of the different sets. The
Sun then posted them to you. |
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The wallchart has spaces for a number of stickers, which you ordered
from the Sun. The stickers were: Teams (22 stickers), Club Crests (22
stickers), Captains (22 stickers) |
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In 1970 the Sun began an interesting series of cards which you
acquired from the newspaper to stick into albums (which they called
Encyclopaedia). The first offering was a set of 134 cards covering
teams from the First, Second and Third Divisions, First Division
captains and star players and Second Division star players. The
fronts of the cards had the pictures while the backs (in various
colours) included the instructions. You obtained tokens which
appeared every day in the Sun during the 1970/71 football season and
send them away to receive some swap cards. The cards were to be
mounted in the spaces left for them in the 164-page Scrapbook
Encyclopaedia of Football (available from newsagents for 2/-). |
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Following on from the undoubted success of the Swap cards the Sun
followed up in 1971/72 with the ambitious Soccerstamps collection. The
Soccerstamps were stamps, rather than cards, and came in a wide variety
of sizes, shapes and colours. The tokens for Soccerstamps appeared in
the Sun each day. The Sun only accepted tokens in lots of six, plus 5p,
to get your 12 Soccerstamps by return post. |
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In 1972/73 the Sun went even further with 3 different types of cards
in the same album. Unfortunately they couldn't decide what to call them,
so they go by a number of different names... The cards were all '3D' and
comprised: 3-D Gallery of Football Stars (50 to collect); Gallery of
Football Action Cards (52 to collect - 50 according to the album, though
52 are known); How to play soccer (6 to collect). |
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A massive set produced by the Sun newspaper for no apparent reason.
This was their first football cards production for 6 years, and it was
another 8 years after this one before they tried again. The set includes
1,000 "full colour drawings" of players, flags and trophies. Presumably
they were unable to obtain the rights to the player photos so they
commissioned an artist to draw the pictures. A typically neat way of
avoiding the payment of image rights. |
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