2023-24 Donruss Soccer is back and it will go down as one of the most infamous soccer card sets in history. If you haven’t been paying much attention there was real excitement for a new yearly set that there hadn’t been in a while. That excitement started when the checklist came out and everyone saw that there were going to be Gold /10 and Black 1/1 Kabooms (Search on Ebay). Colored Kabooms is something the soccer card hobby has never had in a traditional hobby product. It’s something most in soccer have been begging for since all the other Panini sports get them yearly. There are currently only 5 players with colored Kabooms and that was in a 2018 Panini rewards multi-sport product. Well, that excitement was short lived once the first Gold Kaboom surfaced and it was not a design any of us could have ever imagined. It was the ultimate slap in the face from Panini and has put a bit of a damper on a decent product. I am still a bit in shock. With that out of the way let’s see what you can expect if you are getting involved in 2023-24 Donruss Soccer.
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2023-24 Donruss Soccer Cards Breakdown
Checklist – HERE
Box Makeup – Hobby (Search On Ebay) – 12 packs, 1 Auto, 1 Patch, 3-4 Donruss #’d, 3 Optic #’d
Print Run – ~2700 hobby cases. Panini doesn’t give odds so this is a guesstimate from watching case breaks.
SoccerCardsHQ Review – Final thing I will say about the Gold Kaboom disaster (sorry it’s just such a huge part of this product’s story) is this is what we were expecting versus what we got. Not only is it disappointing from the gold aspect but now every Kaboom has Kaboom logo twice which looks dumb. I am interested to see how the 2023-24 Donruss Soccer Gold Kabooms sell compared to the base versions because that will factor into the value of sealed product as time goes on.
Ok let’s get into the rest of the product. I actually like what they did with the checklist adding some club teams from South America and Korea. I saw a lot of complaints about the Korean team inclusion but the way I look at it anything that can get other parts of the world interested into products they normally aren’t is a good thing. It’s not like the Korean players replaced some guys everyone wants to chase. Including South American club teams allowed them to get Palmeiras Endrick rookie cards (Search On Ebay) which to me becomes the chase of the product with the Kaboom debacle. This is the first licensed card that Endrick has. He does have Leaf XRC cards and autos as well as stickers. Topps has no way that I can think of to get him into a set for the 2023-24 season even though he is headed to Real Madrid next season. The question now becomes will Topps use the RC next season? I assume they will but this is the reason we in the soccer card hobby need to be better with how we treat Wookies (a card that is passed as a rookie that comes year(s) after the actual rookie) in my opinion. If you haven’t noticed by now the lack of a go to rookie card is a hinderance on the soccer hobby so when we actually have a limited one we should give it the respect it deserves. OK sorry I went a little off topic there but I had to get it out there.
The rookie checklist this year is solid and could help the product long term. Lamine Yamal is the other big rookie chase but he is going to have so many rookie cards by the time this release calendar is all said an done that the number of options will hurt his values. An interesting rookie/Wookie in 2023-24 Donruss Soccer is Oscar Bobb. Topps used his RC in a 2022-23 Manchester City paper team sets (Search On Ebay) which means they won’t give him a RC in 2023-24. Considering he didn’t get an RC in a hobby product it should help his Panini rookie cards as we have seen play out with players who got their rookies as on-demand or other less desired cards. Panini went full Wookie with Arda Guler in this set. Claudio Echeverri is also an interesting because he’s on River Plate so he likely won’t have many rookie cards.
The solo auto checklist is a lot of fluff but that has become normal in all soccer products lately. There are autos of Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe, Erling Haaland, David Beckham and Lamine Yamal rookie auto (Search On EBay) to chase. The dual auto checklist is fine if with a few nice chases but nothing huge, unless you think Yamal and Fermin Lopez are both headed to stardom, like Topps has been doing. From what I have seen most of the patch cards are unassociated with anything but hey at least you can hit a Messi.
There are two new inserts in 2023-24 Donruss Soccer. Crunch Time is one of them and it has a huge early lead for ugliest soccer card of the year. I think Panini went to the Topps school of outrage marketing for this one. The other new insert is Celebration (Search On Ebay). The Celebration cards are a bit weird. There is no player name on the front, only team, although there are names on the checklist. This France one is for Mike Maignon but people are putting Mbappe in the eBay title since he is on the card and actually looks like he is celebrating more than Maignon. The David Beckham one has a good image for what it’s worth.
The same two case hits are back from 2022-23 Donruss Soccer. Obviously Kaboom is the big one and Night Moves (Search On Ebay) is back again. The Kaboom checklist is strong and for what it’s worth I have heard of plenty of cases with two Kabooms and no Night Moves or two Night Moves and no Kabooms. If you dome a case hopefully you get the Kabooms. I actually thought Night Moves were underappreciated case hits from last year. I think the hobby will be split on this year’s Night Moves design as the background effect is very strong. The problem is Panini put both case hits in blasters and TMall so there ended up being a lot of them. Panini also brought back all of the big players from last year’s Night Moves similar to how they do with Kaboom. That ultimately hurts all the years of these cards. For a few players like Haaland and Bukayo Saka they at least rotated club and country. Messi and Ronaldo both got Argentina and Portugal again. The rest of the inserts we have seen before. The Rookies and Rookie Kings are interesting in that the big rookies and a few that aren’t in the rest of the checklist made it in.
When I first saw the price of presales of 2023-24 Donruss Soccer it was surprising because it was about $100 higher than last year’s release price. I then mentioned to a few hobby friends that must mean we are either getting Endrick rookies or color Kabooms. It was the only way to justify the increase in my opinion. We ended up getting both. I believe if Panini wouldn’t have botched the colored Kabooms this would’ve been an all time product. I would say product of the year but Topps Dynasty (if it ever comes out) will probably take that crown. Now with the Kabooms it feels like a solid product but certainly not one that justifies a $100+ increase in hobby box prices especially with the increase in print run. The hobby seems to agree so far as it is just sitting on the Panini website so far. With proper color Kabooms I think it sells out right away. The product can still be a classic, and it’s not terribly priced say like Topps Pristine Euros, but now it feels like it’s all up to Endrick. It really is such a shame because the hobby needed a newer product at an obtainable price to be excited about and it feels like the wind was taken out of our sails. I will say that Panini has brought back Gold Power 1/1 in blasters so that could be an interesting way to play Donruss. I have not been able to watch any blaster case breaks to get an idea on the print run.
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