Rare, unique 1977 Topps Mexican Football cards gain value despite poor quality, quirks

The sudden rise of collector interest in the 1977 Topps NFL Mexican football set has pushed values for these rare cards upwards in recent years.

Cards that once were difficult to obtain but reasonably priced are now even more difficult to obtain and priced in the hobby stratosphere. Choice items are snapped up by eager collectors, with ultra-high-end hobbyists purchasing whole sets.

Longtime collector Jim Ragsdale currently owns what is acknowledged across the hobby as the highest-quality set of 1977 Topps NFL Mexican football cards. His goal was to complete a full PSA registered set at grade 8 or better. For years, Ragsdale has been plugging in higher-grade cards, replacing lower grades.

“I had my first, ungraded complete 1977 Mexican set done by 2003,” Ragsdale said. “Since then, prices for higher quality cards have shot up. Considerably.”

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Except for the language, the 1977 Topps NFL Mexican set is identical to its U.S. counterpart in every respect. Player pictures are the same and the subsets line up exactly.

Besides the regular player cards, the set features leader cards for passing, rushing, scoring, interceptions, and punting. Additionally, there are NFL record cards, AFC/NFC championship cards, and a Super Bowl card. The year 1977 also happened to be the last season Topps included team checklists.

As with all Topps cards during the final dozen years of its football run, these cards are not barnburners in terms of graphic quality. The photography is humdrum, the design is old hat, and practically the best you can say about the cards themselves is that some truly legendary players are depicted in the heyday of their careers.

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Card guides laud the 1977 Topps NFL set for having rookie cards of superstars Steve Largent, Archie Griffin, Jim Zorn, Mike Webster, Dave Casper, Henry Carson, LeeRoy Selmon, and Danny White, among many others. There’s also a second-year card of Hall of Famer Walter Payton. Penn State legend and Heisman Trophy winner John Cappelletti is another sought-after card among 1977 NFL regulars, going for about $10.

Measuring the standard 2½-by-3½, the cards are printed on the usual card stock of the period, which was cheap. The Mexican cards, in particular, were evidently issued without much in the way of quality control, and it shows.

How this extremely special group of NFL football cards in Spanish came to exist at all is known only to long-retired Topps executives. In retrospect, it seems to have been a far-sighted idea that suffered for lack of follow-through.

What is known is that the printing plant in Naucalpan, Mexico put them out with perforations instead of sending them through a cutter. Then, by all indications, they got hand separated before going in wax wrappers, two and four cards to a pack. The two-card pack included a stick of gum, which guaranteed one of the cards would be stained.

As a result, they didn’t sell very well. Mexican teenagers four decades ago were more interested in the game of futbol (soccer) rather than the rougher game played in El Norte.

Other complications occurred. When going into wax boxes, many packs were poorly sealed, and cards came out torn or otherwise damaged. The unsold cards languished for years until enterprising New Jersey card dealer Steve Freedman bought the whole lot and moved it to his warehouse in the United States.

Later reports further indicate the stock remained with Freedman for several more years before he began moving the cards through the hobby in significant quantities.

Even worse news is that a baker’s dozen of cards were likely run on a short-printed sheet that makes finding quality versions especially challenging. Ragsdale has dubbed these extra-tough cards the “Dirty Dozen.” A population report compiled from cards privately assembled by noted hobbyist Chad Dreier demonstrates how rare some specimens are.

The Dreier report is a handy guide for collectors looking to augment their football card collections with select items from the Topps Mexican set.

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A separate spreadsheet Ragsdale developed compares the Mexican cards to regular Topps sets from 1955 through 1979. It addresses total cards submitted for grading, and which cards received grades of 8, 8.5, 9 or 10 in each year. It suggests that the 1977 Mexican set is the rarest in every category, with twice the value of the others.

There are six cards in the set—Mike Pruitt #444, Lawrence Gaines #21, Reggie McKenzie #48, Matt Blair #84, Drew Pearson #130, and Steve Mike-Mayer #474—for which no high-grade copies exist whatsoever.

“The Dirty Dozen of super tough cards,” Ragsdale said, “includes items ranging from stars to ordinary players. The card which might be rarest of all belongs to [Green Bay Packers RB] Erik Torkelson.”

What sets this NFL issue apart from its U.S. cousin is the fact that it was made in Mexico, printed in Spanish, and intended for the NFL’s burgeoning fan base there. As a one-shot deal, there is nothing else like it in the hobby, and as a consequence, it is the hobby’s rarest Topps set.

The lure for hobbyists boils down not to their essential quality as cards, but to their uniqueness, historical significance, and exceptional rarity.

Seasoned hobbyists agree that the Topps Mexican cards constitute a pretty cool football set, and Ragdale’s achievement in assembling the hobby’s finest version is a remarkable feat. Ragsdale admits he feels a sense of pride in assembling one of the most unique collectibles in the hobby.

“They are fascinating football cards,” Ragsdale noted. “There is nothing else like them in the hobby.”

Special Collection

Nowadays, Latino teens in malls across America sport T-shirts, sweaters, and jerseys emblazoned with NFL logos, with the Raiders, 49ers, Cowboys, and, curiously, the Pittsburg Steelers (Acereros) among their favorites.

Although NFL games had been shown on Mexican TV beginning in the 1960s, no expansive fan base had been developed by 1977. In 2005, the NFL staged its first game in Mexico before an audience of 103,000 at Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium. Eleven years later, the NFL presented another game and has done so every year since.

But decades before any of that, there was this (almost) impossibly unique Topps NFL card set. Where else can you find cards of the Dallas Vaqueros, Pittsburg Acereros, or NY Gigantes?

A unique collection of the 1977 Mexican cards emerged in July 2023 when a former young collector put his full set up for sale. Ragsdale said the find was especially notable.

“I’ve had perhaps 20,000 of the 30,000 cards existing in this set go through my hands at one time or other. This find is definitely special,” Ragsdale said.

The set’s collector, Alejandro Medina, was a 10-year-old grade-school boy in 1977 living in a suburb of Mexico City. Interested in the American NFL (games were televised locally), Alejandro made it his mission to put together a full set of the 528 cards, purchasing wax packs for five pesos, or about 20 cents in the U.S. The packs came with a stick of gum. Some card packs came with four cards without gum, but these did not sell well. The appetite of Mexican youngsters in the 1970s for chewing gum was, by all reports, inexhaustible.

Alejandro pulled it off by visiting mom-and-pop stores, stationary stores, and shrewdly trading cards with friends, accomplishing this remarkable feat inside a year. After that, he stored his accumulation in a shoebox. A plastic bag full of extras he gave to his cousins, and their subsequent fate is unknown.

The box was stored at a rural family property until his sister found it last year and gave it back to him. Through his son Alex, Alejando marketed the set in the U.S., where it was promptly purchased by noted hobbyist Paul Cintura.

“For me, the real provenance in Alejandro’s collection,” Cintura said, “is that it was collected by a 10-year-old who got them in Mexico at the time I was collecting the identical 1977 Topps NFL set in the United States.”

Unlike the NFL Mexicans, the regular 1977 Topps set came in rack packs as well as wax packs. In the latter case, the 1977 regular NFL packs held 18 cards each, meaning you could expect only one of the batch being exposed to a stick of gum.

Not so with the Mexicans. You don’t have to be a math wiz to figure that every other card in the two-card Mexican packs was inserted next to a stick of grape or banana-flavored gum. In the case of Alejandro’s set, however, the gum was fresh enough that it left just a whisper of a mark or none.

Products that didn’t sell sat in the back room of the candy factory until Freedman bought them. The cards had spent years in the Mexican heat before going into Freedman’s storage, where they spent more years in the Jersey cold.

By the time Freedman began selling his hoard in 1983, many had become stained because of long contact between cardboard surface and chewables.

Poor Quality = Value

Made available in Mexico during the 1977 NFL season, Topps does not appear to have sent its A Team south to get the job done, and it shows. However, one of those quirks which in the long run create burning passions in collectors, being badly printed, crudely handled, poorly packaged, and distributed on a hit-or-miss basis, has ironically enhanced its value.

The series was rare in being manufactured in a foreign country. Some Canadian Topps foreign language sets exist—most prominently hockey cards issued in the 1950s and ’60s in English and French.

Topps also made Venezuelan baseball cards from 1959-68. But Topps’ sole 1977 NFL football set in Spanish was a true one-off. Besides being printed in Spanish, the Mexican card set differs in a few minor but key ways.

Five NFL stars appear on the Mexican wrappers—O. J. Simpson, Mike Boryla, Bob Griese, Falcons QB Steve Bartkowski, and Brown’s QB Brian Sipe. This is an actual improvement over Topps regular U.S. wrappers, where the packs just show a stylized football.

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The packs were labeled “Futbol Americano Profesional,” and the boxes had slogans such as “Estampas De Jugadores, Profesionals,” meaning “Professional Player Pictures,” and “Sabores Uva Y Platano,” which means “Grape and Banana,” referencing the gum flavors.

For decades, the set was mostly unknown to hobbyists. Early hobby price guides all fail to mention 1977 Topps Mexicans. Beckett’s 1983 Price Guide, for example, doesn’t list it.

Co-author Carl Lamendola says hobbyists ought to take note of the set’s scarcity.

“The NFL Mexican set is a sleeper-type card issue that came to life for hobbyists long after its debut, and is especially intriguing,” Lamendola said. “Jim Ragsdale and other veteran NFL Mexican aficionados like Paul Cintura should be commended for bringing it out of the shadows.”

Ragsdale and Cintura say the Mexican cards are one of the most desirable football sets in the hobby. Ragsdale added that new collectors often have to set themselves limited goals.

“They look for complete teams now, rather than trying for a full set, starting with their favorites,” Ragsdale said.

When a wave of interest in sports collecting and sports cards flowered in the 1980s, the Topps Mexicans remained under the general hobby radar. Cintura knew about them, however, having been in class with a Mexican kid at the International School while living in the Panama Canal Zone.

“I saw his cards and found them interesting. I already had my own collection, but his were also cool,” Cintura said.

Many strange stories exist concerning how sloppily the cards were put together in Mexico. Perforated sheets were separated by hand by workers who sat on stools yanking them apart.

Workers would package cards with gum by hand. Printing, too, wasn’t stellar, featuring wrong backs, blanks, creases, off-center, off-color, or none. What distinguishes this set from the Topps regular version, as a result, is the scarcity of high-quality cards. It’s amazing, too, that so many defective cards were packaged. The quality of short-printed specimens is a major factor in the set’s value, not rookie cards or star status.

The Erik Torkelson #434, for instance, is among the rarest, a short-printed card among Ragsdale’s “Dirty Dozen.” Among these, Torkelson’s card also counts as one of the ultra-scarce “Fab Four.”

Torkelson, a running back for the Green Bay Packers (Empacadores), appears to have had his card printed very little. If you can find one, a conservative valuation of Torkelson’s 1977 Mexican card is at least $500.

A Torkelson card from the regular Topps 1977 set was offered in October 2023 for $1. In Alejandro Medina’s collection, there is a pretty good-looking Torkelson.

Across the board, though, high-grade cards of the short-printed Mexicans are in short supply and attract fanatical collectors. The set is so rare commons in average grades go for no less than $5 each. If you find one at a show or store for less, buy it.

“I caught a passion for this Topps set as a youth,” Cintura said, “and it’s never left me. Obtaining a complete, quality set of the Mexican version was a real thrill.”

— Mike Bonner and Carl Lamendola are co-authors of “Collecting Vintage Football Cards, A Complete Guide with Checklists.”