The Search for Football Champions, Part 2!

Everything else:

Outside of Ebay, there aren't too many options to find Football Champions on the net. The best bet for an American is to go to each country's Google and search in their pages (under the search bar you can change options).

England:

psi-soft.co.uk

You can buy every 2001-2002 Base set card. The rares are a bit over priced for my liking, but if you really want that Paul Ince for £3.98, then be my guest.

France:

UltraJeux.com

Starters and boosters from the Base set here. The boosters drop in price when you pick up 24 or more (1 Euro to .75 Euro). Shipping makes up half the overall purchase cost though.

Italy:

lppcollecting.it

The most interesting website. Usually when reading Italian, I can understand the main points, however here, I'm totally lost. I don't know if the website has the product I want to purchase. Prices are a bit steep here, and with my lack of understanding of the website, I dare not even try to find out shipping cost. I'll cover this website in a later blog post.

cardgame-club.it

My personal favorite. They have everything and it's real cheap. Other than insane shipping, this is the best website in the world for Football Champions. Only one problem, they (or the person running this website) does not ship to America. In an email with them at the start of 2008, they said to check back in a few months because their website will have changed and shipping to America will happen. I checked back, website didn't change, still no shipping to America. I don't know if they just don't ever intended to ship to America, but the moment they do, cardgame-club will get a nice sum of my bank account.

I guess it's time to send cardgame-club.it another email.

And this is where my search ends. I have never been able to find more resources on the internet for this game. If you stumble across this blog and have another website with FC, I'll post it. Or, if you have cards and want to try and make a deal, I'd be interested in that.

Introductions...

Football Champions is a card game I found after spending numerous years (and cash) playing MLB Showdown. During my time playing MLB Showdown, I was fortunate to meet many people throughout the country and talked to many of them on a regular basis (sup chat). One of the chatters talked about a soccer card game that essentially was MLB Showdown. I was able to pick up a starter and a few packs off UK Ebay. I was hooked.

The game itself was produced by Wizards of the Coast. It started with the 2001-2002 soccer (read: Football) season. The English Premier League, Ligue 1 (French), and Serie A (Italy) were all represented, first with a large base set, then a smaller expansion set later in the season.

After the first season, the French cards were ceased in production. The English sets were produced one more year (2002-2003). However, instead of being called Football Champions, the game was renamed under the Subbuteo moniker. This caused confusion amongst the people who played the game in the first year and was discontinued.

The most successful (or franchise to make it past one single season) was the Italian version. The final season for the Italian game was in 2004-2005.