Why most ‘Buy It Now’ sports cards on eBay are overpriced

Introduction

As a vintage set builder who largely uses eBay to buy cards, I often get very frustrated with not being able to acquire certain cards at market prices.  I have a number of “Followed Searches” on eBay (e.g., what used to be “Saved Searches” but apparently the word “followed” test markets better) through which I get daily updates of new listings on eBay of various types of cards.  For example, I have an eBay search on the words “1950 Bowman” with “SGC”, because I have a 1950 Bowman baseball card set in which all the cards are SGC graded.  I have probably purchased one hundred cards because of this search.

One of the aspects of eBay searching that bothers me is that week-after-week or month-after-month, I will see the same listings that come up repeatedly trying to sell a certain card for well over 200 percent of its market price.  These listings are almost always fixed price (e.g. Buy It Now) listings, but they can be auction listings where the starting action price is above the market value of the card.  Some of these listings can be attributed to the seller not knowing the true market price of the card, but others I have seen literally for years with the card in question not being sold over probably fifty different eBay listing periods.  To collectors, these listings are just an annoyance because they create background noise and waste our time when we are looking at the results of our saved searches or are paging down on eBay after a search.

Since the conversion rate (e.g., actual completion rate where somebody buys the card) on overpriced auctions is very, very low, why do some sellers continue to list cards that are very overpriced?  For cards relisted many times, it is not seller ignorance of the market price, because an economically rational seller would adjust his or her price downward after initially overpricing the card when the listing does not convert into a sale.  To understand some of the dynamics of overpricing, let’s run an experiment.

The Experiment

I went to eBay and looked at all the listings selling a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. #1 in PSA 9 grade.  This card was chosen because it is an iconic modern rookie card of one of the best players of recent decades who is a sure-fire Baseball Hall of Fame player.  The card also exists in sufficient quantity at PSA 9 grade so that determining an average market price can be based on many observations (e.g., converted listings). As such, any average price figure will more likely represent the true value of the card.

While some people might argue that the PSA 10 version of the card should be the standard examined, PSA 10s are less numerous.  Also, the sort of mystical way that cards are given PSA 10 grades versus PSA 9 grades likely makes their market less efficient.  A Griffey PSA 9 is a good benchmark because such cards are “Mint”, generally look the same and cannot have qualified grades by PSA standards.  Therefore, a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. #1 in PSA 9 grade is a standardized card for the most part.

I examined all listings for this card that closed on eBay between 9-27-2014 and 10-31-2014, finding these listings using a number of different search terms related to the card so as to minimize the chances of missing any listing.  While the time window is sort of arbitrary, it covers over a month of concluded listings.  I also did not use listings where multiple copies of the card were being sold or the card was bundled with some other cards.  Only PSA 9 listings were counted.  Shipping was included in any prices reported so as to eliminate the effect of various shipping cost strategies. (footnote 1)

Here’s a description of the raw data:

Number of completed and successful auctions: 40

Number of completed and successful 'Buy It Now' listings: 9

Number of unsuccessful auctions (e.g., opening price was too high) or unsuccessful 'Buy It Now' Listings: 21

The chart below shows the results.

Of the 40 successful auctions, the average price was $42.56.  Prices ranged as low as $36.10 to as high as $51.98 in successful auctions.  However, the market for this card seems to be relatively informed as there is a normal distribution with a vast majority of the auctions clustering between $40 and $46.  Therefore, most final bids squeeze into this $6.00 price window.

The price of convenience. We can actually calculate the price of convenience from the data.  As shown in the chart, the average successful 'Buy It Now' price was $48.38.  Therefore:

$48.38  - $42.56  = $5.82

Thus, the average buyer, who did not want to compete in an auction and thus wait to buy or possibly be outbid, paid $5.82 for the convenience of getting the card purchased right away.  Nine buyers went this route versus 40 who got the card through auctions and generally paid less. (footnote 2)

Returning to the opening thesis of this post, the average price of unsuccessful 'Buy It Now' listings (or auctions where nobody bid on the opening price) was $61.58, which is approximately 145% of the average final successful auction price.  This was also not a trivial amount of the overall listings at 21 unconverted listings.  One seller was even listing the card at $99.99 with free shipping, which is 235% of what the card is worth at auction.

Therefore, we have established with this analysis that some sellers list cards at way above their price in a range that will not lead to the cards being purchased very frequently.  The fact that only 9 of the 30 Buy It Now listings were actually successful indicates that possibly a majority of Buy It Now listings are significantly overpriced, even when one factors in the convenience of not having to participate in an auction.

The Why of Overpricing

So why do sellers list a card in a price range where it is very, very unlikely to sell (for example, the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. #1 in PSA 9 grade at $99.99)?  Here are the reasons that come to mind:

1. They are hoping for an uniformed buyer.  This idea has to be the basis for most of this pricing.  While most buyers of sports cards on eBay tend to know pricing, especially for graded cards, occasionally somebody’s parent or significant other goes online and wants to find a gift.  You would have to be a ‘newby’ to buying sports cards to fall for the $99.99 price on a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. at PSA 9, but this might happen on rare occasions.

2. There is no seller penalty on eBay for unconverted listings.  Because eBay gives away so many free listings to sellers, the marginal cost of listing a card at too high a price is $0.00.  Therefore, it does not cost the seller anything to go fishing for somebody uninformed.  eBay will now even automatically relist unconverted listings for you, so it does not even take time to relist a very overpriced item.

3. There are no negative reputation effects for overpricing.  Because eBay buyers only rate converted auctions, sellers who frequently list 'Buy It Now' items at too high of a price do not receive any reputation loss.  Only if the shipping is priced too high, could it affect their feedback.  As a result, many of the overpriced listings also come with free shipping.

4. Most eBay sellers are not business people.  Business people rightfully consider inventory holding costs as part of their business.  There is an “opportunity cost” to not selling inventory, which is that you do not get the cash for the item that can then be used to buy more inventory to sell.  Since the average seller on eBay is a collector or a small business person, they often focus excessively on getting the best profit margin for card without considering the cost of money tied up in inventory.

5. In some cases, a seller may overprice a card when they are unsure of the market for the card.  I have done this myself.  This type of seller is less of a nuisance because they ultimately drop their price upon relisting as they learn the market.  I suggest that such possible temporary overpricing may even be a good strategy in markets for cards that are thinly traded (I will have another post down the road on thinly traded card markets).

What to do

Unfortunately, I do not think buyers can do much about the nuisance of dramatically overpriced cards on eBay.  Why I call the situation a nuisance is that these listings waste your time as you are looking for cards and have to scroll paste them.

In a perfect world, eBay would provide the solution by changing their pricing structure.  For example, cutting the final value fees by 25% on auctions that start under $1 with free shipping would be a possible solution to this problem.  This could be combined with less free listings.  A lot of sellers listing cards would embrace this option because they are already doing it anyway (e.g., having low starting prices).  Others would follow and volume upticks might offset lower final value fees for eBay.  The relative scarcity of free listings would stop the fishing expeditions with the high priced 'Buy It Now' auctions.

However, I cannot see eBay accepting this idea because the number of listings is a key metric they report to Wall Street.  I wish Wall Street would pay more attention to converted listings.

To do yourself a favor when you search for a widely available card on eBay, click on the button to display Auctions only.  Ultimately, you will pay less, on average, using an auction to acquire a card.  Also, your eyes will thank you with less listings to scroll through since you will not have to look at the Buy It Now listings.  If you do want to pay for the convenience of buying it now, I suggest a quick look at the recent sold listings, which can be found by clicking on a box in the left hand column as your go down the search results page.  That way, you can get an idea of how much you are paying for convenience and if a Buy It Now price is too high.

My advice for sellers who want to sell cards through Buy It Now auctions is to also examine the recent finished auction prices.  As shown on the data on Ken Griffey Jr.’s Upper Deck Rookie card, you would want your Buy It Now price to be at the upper end of the normal distribution of auction prices.  There are some auction buyers willing to pay at the end of the right tail and you can capture those higher than average prices without having to list your card a dozen different times.  The key is to again scan the recent completed auction results and set your price around the level of the highest converted auctions.  Also, you should realize that eBay charges generally higher final value fess on Buy It Now listings.

End Note

Like all other posts, please feel free to make comments.  I review all comments before they are posted in order to reduce spam and keep things on topic.  Also, it may take me a few days to review comments.

Footnotes:

1. I did exclude one successful auction that was an outlier.  In this auction the seller claimed that the card was under-graded and should have been a PSA 10 instead of a PSA 9.  They also included many high resolution scans to back their claim.  This approach seemed to convince some buyers, because the auction closed much higher than other auctions.

2. Two auctions actually went higher than the average Buy It Now price.  Such situations are quite possible when bidders become emotionally attached to “winning” an auction.  Such emotional attachment only costs a couple of dollars on a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. #1 in PSA 9 grade.  However, if one was buying a house at a Sheriff’s auction, such emotional attachment could be more costly.

Conflicts of Interest in the Sports Card Ecosystem Post 1 - Card Companies and Collectors

A conflict of interest is a situation occurring when an individual or organization is involved in multiple economic interests with one of these interests possibly motivating them to act with impropriety in another interest. (footnote 1).  Conflicts of interest are why the President of the United States must put almost all of his or her wealth in a blind trust (e.g., The President does not know what investments he owns), so that economic decisions are not made to benefit their own wealth.  Without the blind trust, a President might be motivated to have defense contracts steered towards companies that they own.

Conflicts of interest occur in many industries or economic ecosystems because companies produce multiple products, but sometimes they can occur because of the fundamental economics of an industry create conflicts between buyers and sellers.

The conflict between card manufacturers and collectors.

As I have talked about in prior posts, it wasn’t really until the 1980s that Sports Card Collecting became a true collectors’ market, sometimes referred to by insiders as “The Hobby”.  Before the 1980s, the vast majority of sports cards were produced for the consumption of children who read their cards, played with them, tacked them on boards and eventually destroyed them.  Because nobody worried about the value of their cards, there was no conflict between card manufacturers and buyers.  Manufacturers tried to put out a product, usually with gum, tobacco or some confectionary product, and they would produce as many cards as customers would buy.  Long production runs were obviously good for the manufacturer because it meant that more gum, caramel, tobacco or eventually cards were being sold.  The business was obviously lucrative enough in the 1950s through 1970s for Topps, Bowman and Fleer to battle both legally and through signing players to contracts in an attempt to capture as much of the market as possible.  However, the customer was not poorly served, especially when these companies had competing sets at various times throughout the time period.  Competition just meant more and better cards for kids, as evidenced by the advances in both the physical size and quality of baseball cards in the 1950s.

As a side note, the only potential losers in the pre-collectible era were the players themselves, and they did not even know it.  As has been documented in a number of places, most players were dramatically underpaid for signing off on their photos for baseball cards.  While a few such as Ted Williams were able to profit more handsomely by selling their likeness to the highest bidders (e.g., the 1959 Fleer Ted Williams set), the average player in the 1960s was getting $125 From Topps for his annual license plus $75 every other year as a signing bonus until Marvin Miller became the head of the player’s union and realized how much Topps was profiting off the players (footnote 2).  Miller quickly fixed this problem.

However, once cards became part of “The Hobby” and had value as collectibles, a clear conflict emerged between card manufacturers and buyers who were now collectors and not kids who destroyed their cards.  The conflict comes from the value of any collectible being determined by the supply and demand for that collectible.  It’s basic economics, but the greater the relative demand for a particular card versus its supply will increase the amount collectors pay for the card.  It’s why we pay more money for Derek Jeter baseball cards than Bobby Meacham baseball cards.  Jeter will be in the Hall of Fame, and we want his cards, while Meacham had six undistinguished years with the Yankees.  We do not want his cards very much.

Where conflict emerged between card companies and collectors was in relative supply.  Long production runs where a card company sells as many cards as possible were still economically good for the manufacturer but not so good for the customer whose cards went down in value as production runs got longer.  Your 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey #1 Rookie Card was worth less as Upper Deck sold more of them.  This created the fundamental conflict between card companies and buyers.  The more cards that were printed reduced the average value of the card as a collectible if other factors were held constant such as the quality of the player on the card.  None of this mattered, of course, when cards were not collectibles, were destroyed by their owners and the value of your cards did not matter.

As I have talked about in previous posts, it was both faulty information and overly-euphoric assumptions about future supply and demand by collectors that created the Junk Wax or Junk Era from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s (see this prior post: http://junkwaxandobservations.blogspot.com/2012/10/what-is-junk-wax-or-what-are-junk-era.html ) where there is so much supply of cards from that era still available today that the cards are almost worthless.  A major part of the information aspect of the building oversupply was that none of the companies during the junk wax era such as Upper Deck, Topps, Fleer, Donruss and Score ever published how many cards they were producing (footnote 3).  One has to believe that withholding production run numbers was purposeful.  At the start of the junk era, card companies usually had one mainstream brand of card at a single price point, as opposed to multiple brands and prices like in 2014, and they were going to sell as many of those cards as they could sell.  Collectors bought them by the case believing that they would sky-rocket in value just as vintage cards like 1950s Mickey Mantle cards had rocketed in value.  If they had known that Upper Deck printed over 4 Billion baseball cards in 1991 (footnote 3), they might have tempered their euphoric buying after thinking about how all these cards were being preserved by their owners.  Thus, publishing print run numbers only could have helped pop the sports card bubble earlier.

While the card companies had no legal obligation to publish print runs, it clearly shows the conflict of interest that existed between card companies and collectors.  Card companies made more money by selling more cards.  However, the more cards that exist hurts the value of their customers’ collections.

This conflict of interest was taken to the extreme by managers at Upper Deck in unethical fashion.  In his 1995 book Card Sharks, Pete Williams builds a very convincing case from interviews with former company executives and industry insiders that Upper Deck executives would have the plant managers reprint certain cards, even supposedly out-of-print cards, that were selling for large amounts on the secondary market.  The executives would then sell these extra cards for personal profit through dealers and other intermediaries.  Since these cards were the same as the originals and off the same presses, they went into the hobby and some probably into your collections.  They can never be known as counterfeits. (footnote 4)

What this scheme did was put big money into the pockets of Upper Deck insiders at the expense of their customers.  Their customers lost because the increased supply of high-value cards reduced the value of customers’ collections.  Such behavior is, of course, unethical because it is cheating your customers.

Today – The uneasy relationship between companies and customers.

Because cards are generally preserved by the collectors that purchase them today, it is hard to create scarcity.  Any form of scarcity is artificially created by the card companies by having certain high-end brands with limited production runs and various types of inserts that are often numbered.  I like the idea of numbered inserts (e.g., 004/125 on the back of the card) because it acts as sort of a warranty from the manufacturer of a card’s scarcity.  Any card manufacturer who printed many duplicate numbers on the backs of cards to increase supply would likely get caught due to the ability of eBay and the internet for card traders to share information.

Yet, because all scarcity is artificially created, the card companies are put in a tough position to try to deliver what collectors perceive as value (e.g., cards scarce enough to be worth their money) but still produce enough product to make a profit.  Because a card company’s input costs are high in terms of licensing fees (please see my earlier post: http://junkwaxandobservations.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-sports-card-royalties-work.html ), they are increasingly squeezed on their margins, which is why we have seen so many of them disappear in the past two decades.  Profit comes from either high volume with OK margins or very high margins with lesser volume.  The proliferation of brands at the major companies and the sky-rocketing costs of packs of higher-end brands indicates that the profits seem to come from the high-end of the market, which is consistent with a smaller, collectibles-based set of customers.  While Topps and Panini (with Score) have their high-volume, lower cost mainstream products, I suspect that the profit is more in the top-end of the market.

Whenever I read product reviews of new card sets that comes out each year on Cardboard Connection or other sites, the reviewers tend to focus quite a bit on the "value" they see in a new release.  Value obviously means bang-for-the-buck in terms of collectible value versus the price one pays for a pack or box of cards.  Sometimes, the reviewers make it seem like the card companies can produce value upon command, and the reviewers are disappointed when that value does not jump out of each pack.  The problem with this perspective is that creating value actually takes money.  Smaller print runs, great autographs and smaller-numbered inserts all increase production costs tremendously.  Therefore, creating value while making a profit is difficult.  This makes being a card company an difficult task because they must create enough value for collectors but the cost of generating that value must be less than its value to The Hobby.  This creates an uneasy relationship.

End Note

Like all other posts, please feel free to make comments.  I review all comments before they are posted in order to reduce spam and keep things on topic.  Also, it may take me a few days to review comments.

Footnotes:

1. Conflict of interest definition adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest

2. Williams, P. 1995. Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child's Hobby into a High-Stakes, Billion Dollar Business. Macmillan Publishing, New York. p. 24.

3. Williams, 1995, various pages.

4. Williams, 1995. Chapter 14 of the book is dedicated to the Upper Deck reprinting scandal.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, But Phil Esposito did Wear Plaid in his early 1970’s Hockey Cards

Occasionally, some sports cards are memorable because of their oddball nature or when something just seems out of place.  Ask any person who was an avid hockey card collector in the early 1970s like me if there was anything strange about Phil Esposito’s cards.  They will say: “the plaid pants”.  It’s funny, but a lot of my friends who collected remember the ridiculous plaid pants that were visible for three years of Esposito’s cards in 1970-71, 1971-72 and 1972-73.

Caption: Above is Phil Esposito's 1970-71 Topps card.  That must have been a sweet leisure suit he was wearing before the photo shoot.

It all started with the 1970 hockey set for which Topps, and their affiliated O-Pee-Chee Canadian partner, decided to get new photos of virtually all players for the 1970 card hockey issue.  The photos were likely done in a studio or conference room because the players’ silhouettes appear in front of the solid backgrounds that in the 1970-71 set also had what seem to be added ‘spotlights’ around the player’s body.   The studio nature of these shots can also be testified to by the fact that most players, other than goalies, are not wearing shoulder pads under their jerseys with a few exceptions.  Most goalies did seem to bring all their equipment with Ken Dryden notably wearing his mask unlike the other goalies in these cards (maybe his shot wasn’t a studio shot).

Caption: Above is Phil Esposito's 1972-73 Topps card.  This was the last year that his plaid pants were visible.

Apparently, when some of Boston Bruins showed up, it must have been a totally half-baked affair (or maybe the players were half-baked).  Either somebody forgot black hockey pants for part of the shoot or Esposito refused to wear them.  It was more likely the former case, because Ken Hodge was shot in his street pants also with that photo only appearing in the 1971-72 set with different, closer-up shots of Hodge used in the other years where his pants did not show.  Maybe Hodge refused to wear them too.  Who knows?

However, this biggest piece of evidence of systematic disarray at the photo shoot theory is that at least five different Bruins appear in the 1970-71 set in wearing Fred Stanfield’s hockey gloves.  The Bruins team put their player’s numbers on their gloves, and Fred Stanfield’s #17 gloves are worn in the photos of Stanfield, Ken Hodge, Phil Esposito, Wayne Cashman, Garnet Bailey and Ed Westfall.  All other Bruins players, like Bobby Orr, are photographed wearing their own gloves if the numbers are visible on the cards.

Caption: Above is Ken Hodge's 1971-72 Topps card.  Ken also joined the no-hockey-pants brigade for one year.  Note that he is also wearing Fred Stanfield's #17 gloves like Phil Esposito.

The fact that Esposito was a great player and future Hall of Famer made the plaid pants all the more noticeable.  When you were a kid in the 1970s, Espo’s card was one of the ones you read, looked over and maybe taped on your wall.  Those plaid pants were just weird.

By the way, if you do not remember, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was a swing-and-a-miss old detective movie spoof comedy that was a collaboration between Carl Reiner and Steve Martin in 1982.

 End Note

Like all other posts, please feel free to make comments.  I review all comments before they are posted in order to reduce spam and keep things on topic.  Also, it may take me a few days to review comments.

1970s Topps Football Cards – Sweaty Guys and Airbrushed Pictures

Topps baseball sets in the early 1970s showed many design innovations like (1) the beautiful black bordered 1971 set, (2) the groovy, hip 1972 card designs, and (3) the 1975 bold color and mini-test-market designs.  These sets were eye-pleasing with mostly good, clean staged photos of players with occasional in-action shots.  As a result, many 1970s Topps baseball sets are still sought after by set builders today.  Thus, despite Topps being a monopoly in baseball cards, product designs were generally fresh in the early 1970s.

In football, Topps went in the opposite direction.  The football card sets basically were pretty awful with the exception of the 1972 design, which built on the bold block lettering and bright colors similar to many late 1960s and early 1970s consumer products.  However, in my opinion, Topps football cards of this era were really just below par because the pictures were not very good.  There was a reason that the pictures on football cards were bad throughout most of the 1970s.  As a cost savings measure, Topps only licensed from the National Football League Players’ Association (NFLPA) and dropped licensing from the NFL from 1970 through 1981 (footnote 1).  As a result, football cards could not show any team logos or other NFL copyrighted images (see my earlier posting here on how licensing works: http://junkwaxandobservations.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-sports-card-royalties-work.html ).  Football cards would have to be produced without using any NFL licensed material.

Why would the Topps Company go without an NFL license?  Obviously, it saved them money, but the main reason Topps could undertake such a money-saving move was their monopoly position in sports cards in the USA in the 1970s.  While Topps had only the MLB players locked up by contracts and thus entry was possible in other sports, very few other companies seemed to want to enter the sports card business, possibly because they could not enter the baseball market, which was the major market by size at the time.  There are likely economies of scale to producing cards for a number of sports rather than just one sport.  You can allocate the capital cost of printing presses, salaries of card designers and general overhead across print runs for multiple sports year round.  For a market as small as sports cards, not being able to market baseball cards to anchor your cost structure was a fairly significant problem (footnote 2).

Anyway, the lack of an NFL license in the 1970s meant that pictures of many players would have to be close up still photos, posed shots or airbrushed action photos.  The photos would need to be airbrushed to clean off all the NFL trademarked team logos to avoid infringing upon NFL-owned properties.  While airbrushing and working around logos is common in the sports card trade, Topps position as a monopolist seemed to make them lazy in the production qualities of the 1970s cards with the pictures on the front especially suffering.  The quality of the airbrushing work was not very strong with colors often not quite matching team colors.  Also, by the late 1970s, a large number of football card pictures seemed to be close up shots of players on the sidelines staring off into space.  These were easy photos to take and did not require much airbrushing to clean up if taken at an angle where no copyrighted logos could be seen.  However, as a result, we have lots of pictures of sweaty players doing nothing.

Caption: Nick Mike-Mayer gets the almost neon green airbrush job of his Eagles helmet in his 1978 Topps card attempting to join Marvin the Martian.  “That makes me very angry.” says Marvin.

When firms are monopolists, they can provide a fairly lousy product or service and charge a high price for it without worrying about competition.  In terms of quality, the monopolist has to produce a product at a quality level that is just high enough to keep customers buying the product since sports cards are not a necessity.  Topps also expanded the size of their football sets in the 1970s, thus making any set builders buy more of their poorly designed cards.

Caption: 1978 Topps Football Cards. Stu Voigt in a posed photo still has a monstrous cowlick.  Give the guy a comb.  On the right, Joe Lavender apparently was reading a good novel on the sidelines.

The 1978 Topps football set represents the low point in picture quality in my opinion.  Now, it did not help the situation that the hair styles of the time were long hair or big afros.  This made football players all the more sweaty or unkempt.  However, we often see in Topps baseball cards from the same era, very nice posed shots of players who have big clean afros or washed hair.  Also, the baseball cards had much better use of lighting without players’ faces being in shadows.

Caption: 1978 Topps Football Cards. Ron Saul and Oliver Davis stare aimlessly off into space.  For some reason, the top of Davis' head has been cropped off.  Apparently, he has too much hair.  Love those sideburns!

Why Topps 1970s baseball cards were so much better than football cards in production values is possibly puzzling since Topps was a monopolist in both products.  One explanation might be that because Topps had a license that paid MLB with royalties that the baseball league gave Topps greater access to players or possibly even demanded better quality.  The NFL had no direct financial stake in Topps' 1970s products, so football teams may have been less accommodating.  Another possible explanation might be that Topps didn’t spend much on the photos because of the size of the market for football cards did not make it cost effective.  A third possible explanation would be that in the late 1970s that Topps card designs deteriorated in general across all sports and that football deteriorated more quickly because of lesser attention by Topps.

In the early 1980s, Topps’ design and photo quality in football cards became much better.  In 1981, Topps introduced a subset of cards in their football set called Super Action cards that had very nice photos of game action.  In 1982, they signed a license with NFL properties and could shows players in their uniforms without airbrushing out team logos.  This made both action and sideline photos easier because the photographer did not have to worry about capturing “too much logo” in any shot that would have to be subsequently airbrushed out.

 End Note

Like all other posts, please feel free to make comments.  I review all comments before they are posted in order to reduce spam and keep things on topic.  Also, it may take me a few days to review comments.

Footnotes

1. http://www.cardboardconnection.com/1970-topps-football-cards

2. Additional evidence of the economies of scale theory would be the short-lived tenures of both Fleer and the Philadelphia Gum Company in the football card market in the 1960s.  Fleer produced cards from 1960 to 1963 for the upstart American Football League (AFL) with Topps having the NFL contract.  When Fleer was sued by Topps in 1963 for beginning MLB baseball card production (and had to stop producing cards after printing their first 66 card series), they did not seem to pursue aggressive renewal of their AFL rights.  I suspect that being denied entry into baseball card market limited the attractiveness of making football cards.  Surprisingly, Philadelphia Gum Company backroom-dealed Topps to get sole NFLPA rights in 1964, which sent Topps scrambling for the AFL players’ rights, which had previously belonged to Fleer.  Philadelphia Gum Company exited with sort of a whimper after the AFL and NFL merged and the NFLPA awarded Topps sole rights to NFL players’ images in starting in 1968.  There is no evidence that Philadelphia aggressively tried to outbid Topps, so I suspect that producing football cards alone was marginal economically (see: http://www.psacard.com/Articles/ArticleView/5019/collecting-the-1966-philadelphia-football-card-set for more on Philadelphia cards from the 1960s and discussion of these contract issues.)