2023-24 Topps Stadium Club Chrome UEFA is finally here over a month later in the calendar than 2022-23 Topps Stadium Club Chrome UEFA was released. Topps was nice enough to give us odds at release this year. The hobby print run is roughly the same as last year based on packs, but there are less hobby cases since there are 20 packs instead of 18 in a hobby box. Topps also replaced retail boxes with a Members Only SKU which is just a single pack Breakers Delight product. There are 1482 base numbered refractors this year compared to 1453 last year. Read the review below to see what to expect this year.
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2023-24 Topps Stadium Club Chrome UEFA Breakdown
Checklist – HERE
Box Makeup – Hobby – 1 Auto, 3 #’d cards (Search On Ebay)
Members Only – 3 #’d cards, 2-3 Autos per box (Search On Ebay)
Print Run – ~3200 hobby cases ~725 Members Only cases
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SoccerCardsHQ Review – I want to start off by saying I love Stadium Club as it seems like most people do thanks to the photography and the full bleed aspect of the parallels. Despite that love the resale value on the cards usually doesn’t match up to the love. I am not sure if that is because of its place in the release schedule or if people are just taking cues from baseball where it suffers the same fate. 2023-24 Topps Stadium Club Chrome UEFA will probably be no different. It seems the consensus is the font used was a bad choice which hurts the overall design.
With that said the set will certainly be ripped as people can’t get enough of chasing Lamine Yamal. I shudder to think of what 2023-24 soccer card products would be doing without him. Well Topps has clearly figured that out as they keep going to the well over and over. Yamal has 10 different cards (Search On Ebay) in this set. That means 9 more Superfractors to get the headlines going as well as even more Marks Of Excellence on-card autos. I was happy when we first say Marks Of Excellence on-card autos were going to be included across Topps soccer sets this year. I thought we were going to get 1 version of each player with some of the parallels in each set. That was not what ended up happening. We got a different version for players in subsequent sets. Often times the image choice on each isn’t that much different than the others which makes it extra confusing. I am also confused how the 3 Lamine Yamal MOE rookie cards so far have been numbered EX-LY1, EX-LY2 and EX-LY6. Are there 3 more Lamine Yamal MOE cards coming in sets this year? Will Topps include Lamine Yamal rookie cards in 2025-26 products? I guess only time will tell.
The rest of the rookies in this set you are likely familiar with as you have seen them over and over this year. To my eye the only new rookie in Stadium Club to even pay slight attention to is Gonzalo Garcia and that is only because he is a 20 year old forward for Real Madrid. He has no path to playing time with the senior club so he would need a move and soon before the hobby gives up on him. Francesco Camarda (Search On Ebay) is in the checklist and Topps clearly paid to have him make his UCL debut, making him the youngest Italian to do so, the day before Stadium Club was released. I am obviously kidding because if they had that power they would’ve made sure his goal wasn’t wiped off. Bradley Barcola is the rookie in the checklist and is performing very well this year. The problem as far as his hobby prospects go is that he is already 22 and he plays in Ligue 1. While we are on rookies there are Rookie Variations exclusive to Members Only. They have color and some players have autos. There are ~200 of the base cards.
While we are on Members Only let’s break it down. As I mentioned it’s a single pack Breakers Delight style makeup. You get 3 numbered cards and 2 autos although I have seen some boxes with 3 autos. The Rookie Variations are a big draw in Members Only because rookies run the hobby world. That said I think the Members Only autos (Search On Ebay) will be the thing that make most people “feel good” if they open a case of Members Only. You are going to get ~6 Members Only autos numbered 50 or lower in each case. Whether these should be valued the same as the same color non Members Only auto is another question. The Members Only are much easier to hit and usually that means lower value, but I don’t see that playing out here so I am not going to waste any more time on it. The Classic Kit autos are also Members Only exclusive and case hits. They are a throwback to the 1991 Stadium Club baseball design which I appreciate, but many new collectors probably won’t as we see from Beam Team. The 32 in 32 (Search On Ebay) team cards could have some collectability since they are case hits and short print. There are Superfractors of each team which I think will be big hits.
2023-24 Topps Stadium Club Chrome UEFA hobby boxes will be where you want to go if you are looking for low numbered parallels of non MO exclusive cards in most cases. For instance, you have almost double the chance of hitting almost all the Superfractors in a hobby case compared to a MO case. Considering the hobby cases are about half the price you can see the big difference. The exception being the Electric Charge parallels which seem to be the ones that you have a better chance of hitting in MO. The Grail (Search On Ebay) is the only hobby exclusive of note and there are 50 of them like has been the case for all of them this year. This is the last Cristiano Ronaldo Grail to be released so if you are chasing the prize good luck. I did notice Topps has put a leaderboard up of the current leaders in the chase for The Grail which is cool. I am a fan of anything that encourages collecting these days.
Other than that the new additions to this year’s Stadium Club are most centered around relics and booklets. The Rivalvision Book cards may get some love because of the combos they used even though I don’t quite understand why Topps keep making rival cards. Best I can come up with is they see how well Messi and Ronaldo and think it’s because they are rivals and not because they happen to be 2 of the greatest players ever. It seems to me the collector base for a Javier Zanetti – Paolo Maldini card would be quite small. Beam Teams are back as back as case hits but are as ugly as ever in my opinion. This is coming from someone who loves the 1992 design. Topps should have just stopped after releasing them in 2021-22 Stadium Club UEFA. Say Cheese is a new insert and is one of the ugliest soccer card inserts we have ever seen. It looks Topps had a kindergarten design contest. If in fact that is what they had done I would have been much more willing to play along as I am for anything that gets kids involved in the hobby.
Topps will be releasing hobby boxes via EQL at $160. Considering that is what last year’s boxes are selling for these would seem to be a no brainer. I do think a price difference of 2:1 between Members Only and hobby is a bit high, but I am not sure it will matter as I am not sure I have seen a Members Only case for sale. In the end you will likely need to hit a numbered Lamine Yamal or get lucky with your auto to make your money back. There isn’t a Kylian Mbappe card in the entire set and very few Lionel Messi. As always Stadium Club will be a fun cheapish rip that will leave you wondering why it isn’t worth more, but yet it never is. At least not up to this point.
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