General Forum

Is anyone familiar with this? I recently purchased an ebay lot (waiting for the cards to come in). The seller said this former NFL player gave him these cards and he turned around and listed them on ebay. I jumped on them (buy it now) because it was a player from my favorite team and they were pretty cheap. The ad states many are one of a kind marked sample. These are all Panini cards and there are many duplicates. I don't think I will be disappointed for what I had to pay but I wondered, does a company like Panini typically give cards to the player that is part of a card set? I'm not familiar with how the industry works.

In the past companies have done that, most notably is probably Topps with their 1990 Topps baseball set where they printed only 100 George H. W. Bush cards that they gave him.

There are currently 4 of those 1990 Bush cards on eBay, ranging from $6,900 to $150,000. 

In the Hockey Card Stories book, several of the players mentioned that they didn't see the cards until someone asked for an autograph and others mentioned buying copies for themselves. It seems that they were not comped any in the 70s or 80s.

There were far more total Bush cards produced than 100.  The 100 "White House Edition" have a Tiffany-like gloss, but an unknown number of non-glossy ended up in packs also.

I may be wrong but my understanding with JOGO.  (football)  The players pay him to have card in the set but they do  receive sets and cards in return.   

I offered golfer Steve Flesch some cards for signing multiple cards for me and he told me Upper Deck sent him thousands (a lot) of cards back then so he didn't need any more. He thanked me for offering though. A MLB player i know told me some companies sent him complete sets when he was playing (1990-91). Nothing unique, just the basic cards. 

Baseball players usually got them from the companies.  At least through 2015 when I asked one at a game.

I'll provide some photos of some of the different cards if/when I recieve them from the ebay seller. It sounds like his comment could be true that this player received them from Panini and he gave them to this seller. I suppose there are players who don't give a crap about their player cards and would just give them away to a friend.