Do you remember the Panini football players' phone cards?

How many treasures lurk in the collections of sports memorabilia lovers. Historic jerseys, programmes and tickets from legendary matches, old albums, posters and signed balls, even themed stamps and special bottle tops. A universe of memorabilia where you can really find anything, between pieces intended for collecting, such as cards and stickers, and items that were intended for other purposes and are now obsolete, such as phone cards. And when two of these areas come together, real “instant classics” can be created for those who are passionate about the customs and sporting culture of yesteryear, as with the microcosm created by the collaboration between Telecom Italia and Panini.

The synergy between the telecommunications giant, now TIM, and the publishing house from Modena has interwoven two worlds that are seemingly far apart, but which are particularly popular with collectors, because they convey the flair of the 1980s/90s and because series such as “Gli Introvabili” are unrivalled Perhaps you remember, for example, the 1997 cards featuring Alvaro Recoba or Edmundo, the new signings from Inter and Fiorentina, who didn't make it into the Calciatori Panini album to make room for unique characters that only exist on Telecom cards. “The untouchables,” indeed. If you don't remember them, you can be sure that connoisseurs haven't forgotten them, so these little pieces of memorabilia have a fair market value today. Let's first take a step back to put it all into the historical and sporting context of our country.

Phone cards and Panini stickers

Once upon a time, there were public telephones, phone boxes, tokens and prepaid cards: everyday objects that characterised the lives of at least a few generations and then, over time, became relics of a distant past. They have been confined to a universe that seems light years away, but in reality is not: you only have to go back about 20 years to relive the last days of telephony before the digital revolution, i.e. the mass spread of mobile phones. The first telephone box in Italy was installed in Milan after the Second World War, following in the footsteps of the red telephone boxes in London. In the mid-1970s, prepaid cards began to circulate instead, before the long process of extinction began in 1985, starting with the landing of the Motorola Dynatac X8000X - the forerunner of today's smartphones - and coming to an end at the beginning of the millennium.

For a long time, phone cards were the most practical way to make calls from a booth; they were found in kiosks and tobacconists, in denominations of 5,000 or 10,000 lire, and were often decorated with graphics that turned them into small objects of art. In this context, Telecom Italia worked tirelessly to find new ideas to enrich the collections: works of art, cities, historical events, monuments, you name it. When they decided to focus on football in the mid-1990s, they immediately found the ideal partner in Panini - the epitome of the Italian sporting tradition. The publisher developed the concept of the series and designed the cards with images and graphics inspired by the famous Calciatori albums, under the official licence of the AIC (Associazione Italiana Calciatori). And as they say, the rest is history.

“Gli Introvabili” and the other series

The first series, “Gli Introvabili",” is the centrepiece of the collaboration between Panini and Telecom. As expected, these are figures that were never printed for the 1997/98 Calciatori album. They feature Alvaro Recoba (Inter), Edmundo (Fiorentina), Edgar Davids (Juventus), Maurizio Ganz (Milan), Antonio Carlos Zago (Roma), Faustino Asprilla (Parma), José Antoni o Chamot (Lazio) and Giuseppe Giannini (Lecce). The first three were reserved for the cards with the greatest rarity and highest value, the 10,000 lire cards, while the others had the more common 5,000 lire cards, all with the same look and feel. On the front, the classic half-length figure with Panini graphics, on the back a stylised drawing from behind with a concentric patterned background and the club colours of the club to which the sportsman belongs.

Following the success of the first series, Telecom and Panini decided to extend their collaboration for the next season. And so “I Grandi Acquisti" was born,” a series dedicated to the big market hits of Serie A. The 10,000 lire cards featured Christian Vieri (Lazio), Giuseppe Signori (Bologna), Fabio Júnior (Roma) and Hidetoshi Nakata (Perugia), while the 5,000 lire cards featured Roberto Baggio (Inter), Oliver Bierhoff (Milan), Juan Sebastián Verón (Parma) and Jörg Heinrich (Fiorentina). In this series, the figures on the front deviate from the traditional aesthetic and show the footballers in action in full length and with pseudo-stroboscopic decorations in the style of the 1990s; on the reverse, however, the colours of the clubs are retained as ornaments, but with a penalty area that is barely hinted at in the strokes.

“The Untouchables” and “The Big Buys” are the two milestones that paved the way for the subsequent editions. Starting with “I Grandi Cannonieri", which came back onto the market in the 1998/99 season and celebrated the historic Bombers of Italian football, distinguishing themselves from their predecessors with their exquisite nostalgic flavour. The cards, in fact, feature old figures taken from the Calciatori albums of the various seasons and thus have different graphic styles (half-length and full-length figures, evolving fonts and logos, etc.). On the reverse, on the other hand, there is data on the number of goals scored in the careers of legends such as Luigi Riva (Cagliari), Roberto Mancini (Sampdoria), Roberto Baggio (Juventus), Alessandro Altobelli (Inter), Roberto Boninsegna (Inter), Paolino Pulici (Torino) and Giuseppe Savoldi (Bologna).

The collection “I Grandi Portieri” (1999) is on the same wavelength: a tribute to the most famous names who have passed between the posts of the Italian national team, including Dino Zoff, Walter Zenga, Angelo Peruzzi, Stefano Tacconi and Gianluca Pagliuca. The obverse inevitably features a heterogeneous style, while the reverse features a drawing showing the Azzurri's extreme defenders in recognisable positions or making saves.

So we arrive in the new millennium, in which there will still be some last collections and limited editions, for example the one dedicated to the 2002 World Cup national team. However, times are no longer the same. We are reminded of this by the value in euros and no longer in lire on the cards, which in turn refers to the years in which telephone credit cards would quickly disappear from the scene. The more modern sims, and with them mobile phones, would forever relegate them to the margins of our everyday lives, along with the landlines for which they were invented. However, there are nooks and crannies where these little heirlooms retain all their charm: antique markets, private collections, special online portals and, above all, your own memories or perhaps those of your parents.