Is Buying Panini Retail Football a Bad Idea?
Plus - Topps Series 2 SP Rookies Print Runs
Is Buying Panini Retail a Bad Idea?
As mentioned in a prior newsletter and through our regular unofficial checklist updates on the 2023 Panini Optic Football and 2023 Panini Contenders Football product release detail pages, there are significant omissions of key rookie autographs in Panini retail blaster releases.
Panini football products have seen early retail blaster releases, with Optic Football blasters hitting shelves nearly two months before the hobby release. For your reference, Hobby Blasters are scheduled to release on May 19, but Hobby boxes are still TBD.
What's missing from the retail blasters? The top-tier autographs from most of the key rookies who sign for Panini like Anthony Richardson, Bijan Robinson, and Jordan Addison.
After several weeks of monitoring eBay sales/listing these cards have yet to surface which indicates they aren’t in the early release retail blasters.
In the case of 2023 Panini Contenders Football, singles started appearing on eBay as early as last week, even though the retail release wasn’t slated until June 16 according to retailers like Walmart, Target, GameStop, and others.
We’ve been tracking eBay listings and sales to publish an unofficial checklist on ChasingaMajors.com, it’s become evident that key rookies like Anthony Richardson are also not in these retail blaster packs.
We speculate that Panini or their printers didn’t have the autographs ready OR Panini is intentionally holding key rookies out of the retail blasters. We tend to think the cards we’re ready which is a contributing factor as to why the continued delay of Optic hobby.
Unsuspecting collectors who rushed to buy retail products were not informed that autographs of players like Anthony Richardson were missing from the early retail release. Which leaves us wondering if Panini retail is a must avoid for the the foreseeable future.
Topps Series 2 SP Rookies
Last week, the buzz around the baseball card hobby centered on Topps Series 2. The late announcement via Topps Rip on Topps.com revealed that SP rookies were added to the product, including Wyatt Langford, Jackson Chourio, and Jackson Merrill, drew both ire from some hobbyists and fanfare from others.
A couple days laters we also learned that Jackson Holliday was added to the SP rookie card run, with various versions of this card, including the “fun face” variant. Personally, I tip my cap to Topps for turning what initially appeared to be a bland, underwhelming release into a must-buy product.
Will we ever know the print run data for these SPs? Officially, it's unlikely that Topps will share this data. Therefore, we’ll need to rely on online marketplace listings and sales to speculate. Over time, the hobby will look to grading metrics to validate scarcity, but we thought it would be fun and worthwhile to take an unofficial, early stab at estimating print runs using eBay data