Cardboard Soccer, Part 1: A History of Sports Cards, For Old People Like Me
If you're old enough to be thinking colonoscopy, here's how sports cards have changed since you were a kid
Lots of things have changed, since I was a kid.
Some have changed for the better (the internet replacing the encyclopedia and card catalogs), some have changed for the worse (hockey teams in Florida), and some feel entirely inexplicable in the year 2026 (how we believed that if you just put cigarette smokers in a different part of a restaurant or an airplane, somehow that transformed the rest of the area into a "non-smoking" section).
You can count sports cards among the things that have changed a lot. When I was a kid, sports cards were collectibles. Now, they are lottery tickets.
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This is Part 1 of a four-part series on soccer cards, leading up to the release of the latest round of Major League Soccer cards. It's free to read, with a free or paid subscription.
