Where Are We and How Did We Get Here? Assessing Race, Performance, and Position in Topps Football Card Placement

Abstract

Sports cards may seem to be of little interest to social scientists, but sports cards and card collecting can be a rich and unique source of data for examining the social world. They reveal information not only about those who collect them, but about the society and social conditions under which they are produced. This paper examines a very unique numbering system developed by the Topps Chewing Gum Company (Topps) to differentiate status among the players appearing on the cards in its annual football sets. The system Topps developed assigned a number to each card that designated a player’s placement in a set, while simultaneously creating a hierarchical ordering among the players, purportedly based on their performance. Was the ranking of players in the numbering system truly based on performance or on other criteria, such as race? The findings of this study suggest that player position, and to a lesser degree his on-the-field performance, not race, was the main determinant of where he was located in the card set.