Topps Now celebrates Ballon d’Or and other soccer award winners
On September 22, French Football announced the award winners for the 2024-2025 football (soccer) season. Both Ousmane Dembele and Aitana Bonmanti claimed the biggest prizes of the night, taking home the Ballon d’Or award, essentially international football’s MVP. Along with the Ballon D’Or, other awards given out that night included the goal scores, and Kopka award for best young player won by Lamine Yamal and Vicky Lopez. Now to celebrate the event Topps is producing Topps Now sets featuring cards of some of the winners at the Ballon d’Or ceremony.
The Topps Now sets include cards from all the winners of the major individual awards including Ballon d’Or winners Dembele and Bonmanti. The set itself is also unique in that along with the standard foilfractors numbered to 50 and below there are also relic cards numbered to 25 that include pieces of the red carpet from the event. Lastly, each set contains a 1/1 foilfractor auto.
Of all the players who won awards, perhaps the most desirable Topps Now set will be from Kopka Trophy winner Lamine Yamal. As I said in my Ballon d’Or preview article, the Barcelona midfielder is already a massive star at the age of 18 and is being mentioned among the greats of the sport like Messi and Ronaldo. From a collecting standpoint, his hobby market to put it lightly is incredibly robust with ungraded cards selling for several hundred dollars.
Of note, a nice addition and distinguishing feature to the Yamal Topps Now set is that along with the foilfractors, relics, and auto, there are also short print image variations. Topps Now sets tend to be a bit of a gamble, but I suspect that the chance to get a low numbered Yamal card for a solid price point will be too good to pass up for many collectors.
