The 1977 Topps Mexican set: How a child conquered one of the greatest challenges for NFL collectors

New York Times

12-04-2025

One of the joys of collecting is to find a group of like-minded passionate people in the smallest corners of the hobby. You can't find one smaller than the Topps 1977 Mexican Football set.
Sold mostly in Mexico City in late 1977 and 1978, the cards parallel the 1977 Topps set issued in the United States, but with team names and card backs translated into Spanish. So the Bears are the Osos, the Giants are the Gigantes, and the Browns are the Cafes. Even the position abbreviations are translated. For example, WR for wide receiver is AA for Ala Abierta ('open wing,' in English). Topps had the NFL Players Association license at this time, but not the NFL license, so team logos were not included on the cards.
What makes this set so rare is that the price of the cards was the same in Mexico as in the U.S., except each pack contained two cards and a stick of gum, versus the 10 cards and a stick of gum that kids in the states were able to buy for the same equivalent 15 cents. (Kids wanted the gum more than the packs that initially were offered with four cards and no gum.) But this was a 528 card set. The math to collect the complete set organically as a kid in 1977 in Mexico City was daunting.
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With two cards in a pack, you needed to open 323 packs on average to just about guarantee finding a specific card, according to pack odds relative to set size. But invariably you'd still be missing some and would have to start over with a new box and buy all those packs and hope you got lucky quickly. Another problem: Most of the packs in a box had the same cards. Bottom line: it was incredibly cost prohibitive for the target child buyer to build the set then.
Enter Alejandro Medina and his doting grandmother.
'They just appeared in candy stores and papelerías' (stationary stores),' Medina said to the buyer of his childhood collection, Paul Cintura, when Cintura interviewed him to document the unique purchase in August of 2023. 'Back then we often had to go to the papelería to buy illustrations of Benito Juarez, Emiliano Zapata, etc. to complete our homework assignments. Lots of kids went there, so those were the perfect places to sell cards and candies. That's where we discovered them.'
Medina told Cintura he came from a family with means and his grandmother was charmed by his passion for the cards and constantly fed him money to buy more during the months that followed. A family connection who owned a newspaper and magazine distribution business gave him whole boxes but that didn't prove very fruitful due to the boxes generally having the same cards.
Medina collected the cards as the kids to the north of Mexico generally did, organizing by team with the checklist on top and targeting players by name, not card number. And storing them in a shoebox. Medina said friends and cousins collected the cards, too, and lived in different neighborhoods in Mexico City, with different inventories. So trades were a huge part of social occasions in the months that followed, and especially during the holidays.
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Soon Medina had all the cards, and was the only person he knew who could make that claim. He never played with them, so they remained in 'collector grade,' according to their current owner, Cintura. (Basically the equivalent of a PSA 5).
Fast forward to 1982, when unsold inventory of the 1977 Mexican football cards was stored in a factory. It turns out the cards were the flavor of the month, quite literally, with grape and banana gum included in each pack (and thus often spoiling one of the two cards it was pressed against in the pack). But they quickly fell out of favor, hardly surprising since American football was barely known in Mexico, where soccer commanded near complete attention. The excess inventory was ultimately returned and 10 cases of about 40,000 cards ended up sealed in a Mexican factory until they were rescued by card dealer Jim Ragsdale, a vintage football specialist and, according to Cintura, the set's biggest advocate.
So now in addition to the first generation of 1977 Mexican football cards organically collected by children upon their release, we had a second generation of more pristine cards, many in high grade. (Note there is no PSA 10 in existence since the Mexican cards were perforated rather than machine cut and thus can't meet PSA Gem Mint grade requirements, according to Cintura.) From this second generation, Ragsdale compiled three sets with every card averaging better than a PSA 7.
All together, combining the first and second generation 1977 Topps Mexican cards, there are just 39 sets known to exist, according to Cintura. That's a microscopic number. Consider that Beckett's #3 Baseball Card Price Guide published in 1981 said that there were 380,000 1975 Topps baseball sets then completed (but who knows how many parents subsequently threw away).
A PSA 8 example of one of the 60 Hall of Famers in the set can run upwards of $5,000, according to Ken Gelman, a football set collector who has one of the top PSA registry sets, meaning that PSA averages their grades for every card in the respective sets. There are supreme rarities within this rarest of all sets — nicknamed the 'Dirty Dozen' (pictured above) and 'Bakers Dozen' by Ragsdale for their impossibly short print runs.
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Cintura's set is the only one known to have been completed out of packs bought at the time by a single collector. It's one of 70 football complete sets he said he owns, most in top grade. But it's this one Medina completed nearly 50 years ago with his grandmother's support that means the most to Cintura.
For years, Gelman chased the Topps Mexican set like a proverbial white whale, really the only way to have a chance to capture it. After attacking the set piecemeal pre-pandemic, he saw how impossible and astronomically priced his pursuit would be. He contacted Ragsdale, who had the three sets averaging over a PSA 7 in grade, including the only one with an average grade over an 8.0, for advice. Sensing Gelman's passion, Ragsdale gave Gelman a price for one of his three sets and offered to let him pay in installments over time, with cards shipped upon each payment. Three years later, the deal was done. With every card graded, Gelman's set is now No. 4 in the world in average condition, 7.39 according to PSA.
Gelman says his set is worth 'over $100,000' but they are hard to value more precisely outside of an auction sale. And good luck finding one since they are prized possessions of their avid collectors. The joy of completing one of the hobby's most daunting, time-consuming and fully immersive journeys that's priceless to this small 1977 Topps Mexican set community.
'This is a legacy set for me as a football collector, and it was also the era that I grew up watching football,' Gelman says.
In his gigantic collection, Cintura's prized possession is his one-of-a-kind organically collected, first-generation 1977 Topps Mexican set. He's hoping that if Topps ever has a museum, even a virtual one, that it would be displayed, along with the story of its one-of-a-kind provenance.
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