Barcelona's Teen Star Has First Card in 2025-26 Topps Chrome UCC, Worth the Hype?
You have heard the names Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal. You're familiar with their card prices. They don't just share soaring prices; they also came from the famed Barcelona academy, La Masia, in Spain. Enter the next Barcelona starlet tearing up the youth leagues for Barcelona, Ebrima Tunkara.
Tunkara just turned 16 in March and is playing his first season of professional soccer with Barcelona U-19. On the international side, he has already moved up from the Spanish U-16 team to the U-17 team. Coming later this month, he will receive his first licensed card.
Getting The Bowman Treatment
Tunkara's first card comes in the UEFA Youth League Bowman subset of 2025-26 Topps Chrome UCC, dropping later this week. While it isn't his rookie card, we can likely expect it to be once he debuts for the senior team. Until then, we get his 1st Bowman.
While the Bowman name is mostly known to baseball collectors, the Bowman U Chrome sets for college basketball and football have also taken off. It was introduced in the 2024-25 Topps Chrome UCC and featured Lennart Karl of Bayern Munich as the headliner.
Karl's base cards out of the Bowman subset last year are selling for $20 each. The most expensive sale of Karl's 1st Bowman was a PSA 9 Black Refractor /10, which sold for $3,500.
La Masia Hits and Misses
There is a long history of "the next big thing" coming out of Barcelona, with every child prodigy instantly compared to Lionel Messi before Lamine Yamal emerged as a superstar. There have been some very good players to come out of the Barcelona academy - Dani Olmo, Fermin Lopez, Gavi (when healthy), and the latest being Yamal - all having some degree of hype in the hobby.
However, some hyped hobby names have also not panned out. The most notable being Ansu Fati, who was the original chase of the 2019-20 rookie class in Topps products. His most expensive sale was a 2019-20 Topps Chrome Sapphire Orange /50, graded PSA 10, which sold for $11,000.
Some other names that had some hype, like Adama Traore, Konrad de la Fuente, Marc Guiu, Unai Hernandez, and now Dro, have failed to live up to expectations. It might be a bit early on Dro, as he left for more playing time at French giant PSG in January after Topps Flagship dropped with him in a Barcelona kit.
Is Tunkara Worth Chasing?
The odds are a bit different this year for the Bowman subset than the 2024-25 set. In last year's set, there were only 7 total players on the checklist, and the highest-numbered card was /75. So your odds of hitting a parallel were 1:4828 packs, and they were hobby exclusive. That meant any parallel of a Bowman prospect was harder to hit than an /5 true red refractor of a player in the base set.
Things are a bit easier this year. The Bowman UEFA Youth League set won't be exclusive to just hobby this year and will be available in all formats except for Breaker's Delight. In addition to being available in more formats, the checklist is expanded to include parallels up to /199, adding green /99, blue /150, and aqua /199, along with the parallels for 2024-25. The new pack odds are below.
Back to Tunkara, is he worth prospecting on? He mainly plays as a right winger and occasionally as an attacking midfielder, but ideally, he stays a winger like Messi and Yamal, not a midfielder like Olmo and Gavi. Both are very talented, but not as collectible. His goal scoring at the junior level is ridiculous.
He has 9 goals in 7 games at the junior level as a 15- or 16-year-old. He hasn't scored yet in the UEFA Youth League, but has only played 132 minutes across four games against significantly older players. Internationally, for the Spanish U-17 side, he has 6 goals in 8 games. Looking back at Yamal at the same age, he didn't score in the Youth League either and had 8 goals in 11 games for the Spanish U-17 side.
I get the hype with those numbers. Hopefully he's closer to Lamine Yamal than Ansu Fati.
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Brendan has worked for various platforms, including The Washington Post, SB Nation, NBC Sports Washington, and more, covering everything from college basketball to fantasy football and betting. An avid collector as a kid, he got back into collecting in 2021 and is a dedicated soccer, football, and basketball collector.
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