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.
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
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.)
