2023-24 Select Serie A is back for its second year. Once again it figures to be the shortest print major soccer card release of the year. If you have opened any Select in the past 2 years you are pretty familiar with how the product works now. Keep reading to see what to expect in this year’s product.
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2023-24 Select Serie A Breakdown
Checklist – HERE
Box Makeup – Hobby (Search On Ebay) – 3 Autos OR patches, 5 #’d cards
Print Run – ~650 hobby cases.
SoccerCardsHQ Review – I would suggest reading the 2023-24 Select La Liga review as that has a lot of the overall product details since the basic makeup of all of the 2023-24 Select products will be the same. The case hits are all the same, but the print run of each will be different. This Serie A product is once again very short print by hobby standards and will likely be the shortest print of the 4 Panini Select products. Serie A has mostly the same hobby parallels (Purple in for Orange) as La Liga, but the numbers on some of the parallels are different because Panini likes to keep us on our toes. For instance, Winter Camo in La Liga is /99 and it’s /30 in Serie A. The highest numbered parallel in 2023-24 Select Serie A is /49. Similar to last year you are going to get a ton of low numbered stuff. You have about an 80% chance of hitting a 1/1 in a case and will hit on average 8 Gold /10 in a case. Now it’s just a matter of will those cards be of people worth it.
2023-24 Select Serie A will likely be carried by a couple of rookies and the autos. There wasn’t a lot of hobby superstars in Serie A this year. Luckily for Panini a few of the best USMNT players made the move to help out the checklist a little bit. Kenan Yildiz (Search On Ebay) and Francesco Camarda (Search On Ebay) seem to be the two rookies that have some hobby hype right now. There was a lot of hype around Yildiz earlier this season but that has worn off as he didn’t do too much this year. He will be at the Euros with Turkey so he has a chance to get a big spotlight if he performs. Yildiz is one of the first tests of if the soccer card hobby will respect the 1st Bowman shield they have used in some team sets of academy players. Yildiz got cards with this designation in the 2022-23 Juventus sets (Search On Ebay). Topps gave him a RC in 2023-2024 products so he will have so many cards with a RC and not nearly as many with a 1st. In baseball cards this plays out very well for the 1st auto cards, but with not too many players in soccer getting them it’s hard to see them catching on in a similar manner. As for Francesco Camarda he is a 16 year old forward for AC Milan. Those are all hobby plusses. The not so great news is he’s only played 14 senior minutes and if he stays with AC Milan he might not get the time needed to cause hobby hype for a few years. We have seen this story play out many times before. He also has Topps rookie cards so he will have plenty when all is said and done.
The auto checklist will be carried by legends highlighted by Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Search On Ebay) in an AC Milan kit. While Zlatan autos are new and fresh right now he is getting auto in everything so be careful. There are plenty of other legends including Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo Nazario, Andrea Pirlo, Ruud Gullit, Dennis Bergkamp and Alessandro Del Piero to name a few. We have seen those players in a lot of products lately so while they are great to hit, not many of their autos will even cover the price of a box.
As mentioned above if you want more general details about the case hits check out the La Liga review. Once again outside of the Stained Glass the other case hits don’t seem to be getting much hobby love despite their relatively small print run from the La Liga sales we have seen so far. The Stained Glass design has been panned by pretty much everyone in the hobby and the prices are reflecting it. Neither of the rookies mentioned above get a Stained Glass as Panini went with Mateo Retegui as their RC choice. On a side note Panini must have high hopes for Retegui as he also got a Kaboom RC in Donruss. Diego Maradona and Zlatan are a couple of legends that get a Stained Glass in what is a decent checklist for what they had to work with. The print run breakdown for the Serie A case hits are Stained Glass ~22 (Search On Ebay), Artistic Impressions (Search On Ebay) and Visionary (Search On Ebay) ~26 and Team Badges ~32. If there is a case hit you want you can probably wait a few sales but these dry up pretty quick.
Just reading the tea leaves I am guessing that 2023-24 Select Serie A hobby boxes are going to release a little over $400. (Update: Panini released at $435 and it’s sitting for now. I think some of the early singles sales have made people realize at that price it isn’t a great deal.) 2022-23 Select La Liga hobby boxes go for less than that with some of the big sites down to $325. I can’t say definitively which one is better, but I would rather rip last year at those prices. That said it should sell out quickly because there is so little of it and breakers will be breaking it. If you like the product and want to rip with a chance of getting a case hit, you should buy from Panini. As I always warn if you are buying single boxes second hand figure the case hits are gone except maybe the Team Badges. Like I said about Serie A Select last year, it’s a feel-good product. Even if you hit wrong players, you still feel good if you hit a 1/1 and 8 Golds even if you don’t come close to getting your money back. That’s the real value of 2023-24 Select Serie A.
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