October 21: The Topps ‘Final Farewell’ pack marking Lionel Messi’s final game with Argentina has set a record for the Topps Now program, with 664,325 orders.
That tops the 653,737 orders for Shohei Ohtani’s 50-50 season card in 2024, a remarkable result in a hobby long dominated by baseball.
Launched in 2016, Topps Now produces cards that commemorate moments as they happen, printed to order and sold for a few days only.
The Messi release was a two-card pack priced at $19.99 and sold from October 9-16. A card was a basic, parallel or one-of-one autograph. The other was a variation marking his Argentine records, a short copy or a unique autograph. Orders reached 250,000 on October 13th and 450,000 on October 15th.
“I thought it would be good,” said Clay Luraschi, senior vice president of global product development at Fanatics Collectibles. “Am I surprised that I did this well? No, but I think what I saw that was surprising was that there was a lot of activity at the beginning, but that activity continued until the end.”
Messi now has two of the top five Topps Now runs, with his retirement announcement card at 335,283. The others are the Ohtani 50-50 card, the 2024 Olympics card of LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry with 588,030, and Jack Hughes’ Olympic gold goal with 332,447.
Short print runs, variations, and memorabilia used with matches have turned Topps Now from a niche product into one of the company’s biggest lines. Messi has three publicly known card sales of $1 million or more, according to Card Ladder.
Fans have made growth in Europe, Asia and Australia a priority, and football is central to that plan.
“When you think about Messi’s fan base, when you think about global football and then you think about how that translates into trading cards, that sector of the business just has a lot of upside,” Luraschi said. “I think we’re just scratching the surface with world football and I think that was definitely a sign of what’s out there and what the potential is.”
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