A Father's Love For The World Cup

The World Cup is down to the Semifinals with tomorrow’s Brazil-Germany match and Wednesdays Netherlands-Argentina match with the winners moving on to the Final on Sunday July 13^th. At this point, with the way that the final four teams are playing, it could go any way. If Silva wasn’t out with his second yellow card and Neymar out with a back injury I would have picked Brazil to take it all but with those loses any of the four teams can win the title.

 

To celebrate the final leg of the World Cup I am going to post up some of my recent soccer pick ups. As I have said before the 2014 Prizm World Cup release is one of my favorite releases of the year so I am targeting these cards to build a set. One of the things that bothers me about this set is the flood of parallels but that doesn’t mean I don’t mind picking some up from time to time and here are the three Father’s Day parallels that I picked up this past week. The cards were inserted in to Panini’s Father’s Day packs and are #/7 each. The cards are exactly the same as the base cards except for the "Panini Limited Edition" on the front and the #/7 on the back.

 

While the top named players Father’s Day parallels are selling for well over $150 there are plenty that are selling for less than $5 with shipping. Together these cards cost me a total of $9.05, including the shipping.

 

First up is Alexandre Song

 

 If it were not for Suarez biting Italy’s Chiellini on the shoulder during a match Song would have taken the “A-Hole of the World Cup” award. He was beyond physical, hitting and punching other players during his two games. He received a red card against Croatia and was banned for 3 games by FIFA. He is currently at the center of an investigation, along with 6 other Cameroon players, by Cameroon‘s football federation for fixing World Cup matches. It was no surprise that I was the only bidder of this card and it cost me .99 cents and $2.50 shipping.

 

Next up is Joao Moutinho

 

Moutinho is a solid player but no goals, no assists and being overshadowed by Cristiano Ronaldo on a Portuguese team that did not advance past group play kept his card prices very reasonable. I was happy to pick up this card for $2.25 shipped.

 

Finally is Igor Akinfeev

 

Akinfeev is by no means the best goalie at the World Cup but in the first two games he gave up only 2 goals and with Russia needing a win over South Korea to move along he had to become a brick wall. If you want to surmise Akinfeev’s World Cup experience just watch Korea’s Keun-Ho Lee’s long distance goal in the 69^th minute. Just plain ugly goalkeeping but it worked out in my favor, .99 cents plus $2.32 shipped and I was able to catch and keep the card in my hand.

Some Sets Are Made To Collect But The Amount Of Parallels Make You Say "Forget It!"

One of my favorite sets of the year is Panini’s 2014 Prizm World Cup, which came out in May. I am a huge soccer fan and every four years during the World Cup I am in heaven so this set is ideal for me.

 

I have not been a big fan of Panini’s Prizm releases, they just never sat well with me, but the collaboration of soccer and Prizm works well here. I dig this release and have decided to put together a set, something I have not done in many years. The set itself is not huge and consists of the base set (201 cards), ten inserts (210 cards total) and three autograph sets (62 cards total) for a total of 472 total cards on the checklist. I plan on skipping the autographs for now so the 411 base card/insert set shouldn’t be too difficult to put together. I may pick up a hobby box but so far I have been slowly building the set using hanger boxes and singles.

 

As I entered my cards in to Zistle I noticed that the base set was added but nothing else. Zistle uses “Set Experts” to keep individual sets up to date and complete as possible and there was not a set expert for the 2014 Prizm World Cup release so I applied and was accepted. I put in some serious time this weekend and was able to complete the entire checklist for the release. As I was verifying the checklists I noticed the total amount of cards on the checklist is an insane 5,688 cards.

 

I feel sorry for the completest set collectors who need every single card an all of its parallels. The main 472 cards are manageable but the problem here, as with most modern sets, is that there are tons of parallels. Most of the cards have 10-12 parallels with some, the Black and El Samba parallels, limited to 1/1, there are also parallels limited to #/5, #/7, #/10, #/25, #/99, #/149 and #/199.

 

This product is made for the set collector and the positive thing about collecting this set is that there have been so many cases busted, Panini actually sold out, that you can pick up base cards cheap on the secondary market. It is actually cheaper to pick up a lot of 20-25 cards for $5 than it is to purchase a $20 hanger box with 24 cards. It is going to take some time but I look forward to the challenge.