1977 Topps Mexican Football

In 1977 Topps of Mexico issued a 528 football card set that is a parallel of the United States issue.  The main differences are the text of the cards are in Spanish, the way the cards were cut are quite different and they are much, much harder to find.  This is one of the hardest regular issue post-war sets to put together.  There are probably under 20 complete sets in the hobby.

No one has any good information on the way the cards were distributed or how many were produced.  I called Topps to see what I could find out, and they told me that since the archives division was closed and auctioned off in 1989 and since Topps no longer has a Mexico location, there was no place at Topps for me to find information on this product. 

What is known is that the cards came in two types of 36 pack boxes, 2-cards per pack with gum and 4-cards per pack without gum.  The wrappers featured 5 different players and were probably the best looking wrappers of any set.  The featured players were Bob Griese, OJ Simpson, Mike Boryla, Brian Sipe, and Steve Bartkowski.  The packs that had the grape and banana flavored gum invariably had one card that was damaged by the gum.  Collation on this product is terrible.  Out of 72 cards, I had one box that only had 12 different cards, with 22 of them being #464 Howard Twilley.  If you get a box with the major stars in it, you've just hit the jackpot.  The best box I have heard of had 6 or 7 #360 Walter Paytons in it.

As far as I have been able to determine, the majority of the supply of Topps Mexican cards were brought up from Mexico by Steve Freedman in the early 1980's.  I have heard the total was about 20 cases.  These cases were then sold and over time have been mostly opened.  For a while, Mike Hattley at Touchdown Treasures had a supply of boxes and Mark Murphy, the BBC Kid had a case or so.  There are a couple of dealers with unopened boxes as of this update.  With the poor collation of cards, for years there was speculation that a complete 528 card set did not exist.  I believe the first set was assembled in the mid-1990's.  There are occasional finds in Mexico of cards or even near-complete sets.  However, most of these have proven to be worn and range in the Pr to VGEX range.

Recently a few collectors have been pursuing PSA graded sets on the PSA Registry.  There are 17 sets registered, with the highest ranked set being 100% complete with an average grade of 8.02.  Congrats to Bigjimmi, that is an awesome feat.  The number 2 set on the registry is also 100% with an average grade of 8.01.  Also an awesome set by Don.

In 2008, Beckett further updated the listing of the Mexican set with a total price of $23,500, up 46% from the 2007 guide and 135% from the guide before that.  Beckett assigns SP status to 76 of the cards and increased their values.  The SP designation fails to recognize the all short printed cards in the set.  In addition, some of the commons are listed at $20 or $25, possibly indicating an SP status, but not explicitly designated.  While the revised prices are in the right direction, they still do not reflect the actual scarcity of some of the cards.  Cards that are listed as $200-300 in NM-MT that get picked up for $100-$300 in poor condition are more representative of the difficulty of the short printed cards.  If there were actual NM-MT cards of the most difficult short prints available for sale, in my opinion they would sell for several multiples of the guide price.  Here's my take on the short prints.

The star cards in the set include:

• #1 Passing Leaders (Harris/Stabler) $125
• #3 Rushing Leaders (Payton/Simpson) $600+
• #29 Lee Roy Selmon (R) $200+
• #45 Roger Staubach $150
• #55 John Riggins $50
• #99 Mike Webster (R) $120
• #100 OJ Simpson $100
• #110 Ken Stabler $200
• #177 Steve Largent (R) $600
• #195 Lynn Swann $150
• #245 Terry Bradshaw $125
• #269 Archie Griffin (R) $300+
• #274 Dan Fouts $50
• #300 Franco Harris $120
• #342 Randy White (R) $50
• #360 Walter Payton $400
• #400 Fran Tarkenton $60
• #453 OJ Simpson RB $250+
• #480 Jack Lambert $80
• #505 Larry Csonka $60
• #515 Bob Griese $50
• #526 AFC Championship (Stabler) $60
• #527 NFC Championship $60
• #528 Superbowl XI $800+

If you have any questions about the 1977 Topps Mexican set please feel free to contact me through my profile page.  I'm always interested in talking about the set or helping people to complete their sets.  Thank you for taking time to read my guide.  If you found it helpful, please vote "yes" for helpfulness.

Updated March 29, 2008