Topps Celebrates Success of Italian Collecting at Card Fest

It's just past 10:30 AM at the Hotel Quark in Milan, but the event hall is already bustling with hundreds of people milling around tables and the thousands of cards awaiting them. For the first edition of Card Fest in Milan, this is the morning after the party: the night before, Friday, the event kicked off with the overwhelming success of the Trade Night, an evening designed to welcome card collecting enthusiasts and engage them in trading. As the hall placidly but rapidly fills with enthusiasts flocking to the stands of the 150 exhibitors, we move through the sparkling red of the Topps stand (event sponsor along with eBay) to chat with Camilla Galassi, Senior Marketing Manager of Topps Italy.

Hello Camilla and thank you for answering our questions. I'll start by asking you what Topps' impact on Italy has been like, a country where historically the cult of the sticker prevails more than collecting.

Topps is an American company, a multinational leader in the production and distribution of collectible cards, especially, more than TCGs (cards linked to some game, like Pokémon for example). We are in the realm of collecting, a culture that in America has obviously existed for tens and tens of years. In Italy, we, let's say, imported this type of collecting around 2021, but traces of it existed even before.

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I have vague memories of motorcycle cards when I was a child, so many years ago.

Yes, exactly, they were sporadic collections. Even we, as Topps, already had collectible cards in our catalog, in addition to stickers, but it's a much less premium market. They still exist today, we call them Mass Market: they are still very beautiful cards, Topps quality is always very high, but they are entry-level, both in price and in sales location. Collectible cards are another type of product: not being linked to a game dimension, they target a different, slightly higher, more adult audience. Collecting, after all, is part of our cultural heritage, from stamps to phone cards. This world of collecting, which comes from the USA, which we define as Hobby, we brought with a well-defined target and it has a different distribution model that goes through specialized collecting stores. These are products with a higher price point. Between Mass Market and pure Hobby, there are what we call Hobby Retail products, boxes at non-prohibitive prices (25 or 29 €) designed for the collector approaching this world, perhaps coming from Pokémon or similar. Pure Hobby, on the other hand, has higher prices, because it is based on scarcity and those who buy aim to find rarity.

As a comic book enthusiast, it's a bit like what happens in comics with variants and blind bags.

Exactly. We can then leverage our licenses (ranging from UEFA to F1, NBA, WWE,...) for very rare cards, such as those autographed by athletes or with pieces of worn jerseys. The trend of collecting, broadly speaking, is gaining a lot of traction in Italy to the point that we don't feel in competition with Pokémon, in the sense that it does something different, even if profitable for card collecting, because Pokémon collectors can become sports card collectors tomorrow.

How much resistance did you encounter in Italy, where there was more of a culture of stickers to stick, but above all where Panini always swore that all stickers were produced in an identical quantity, whether true or not?

Let's say that in Italy, and generally in Southern Europe, stickers have dominated for generations. So much so that the sticker album today is more a cultural legacy for the forty/fifty-year-old adult rather than an everyday object in a child's hands. More often it's the adult who remembers collecting from the '80s and wants to complete the entire album. So stickers initially were a bit of an obstacle for us, in the sense that in Italy the main culture was that of stickers. However, I must acknowledge that over time, the success of Pokémon has shifted the focus towards collecting even in the view of the average Italian. Once, your goal was to complete the album; today, however, the collector's goal at any age is to obtain the specific card you are interested in, in the version you are interested in, not the entire collection. Let's say it's a much more manageable, much more immediate type of collecting, and consequently, it represents an advantage for cards over stickers. We are not at the level of the USA, where only or almost only the collectible card market exists, but we are gaining ground.

Are you replicating the USA model in Italy?.

Initially with a bit of fear, but yes. We started from scratch, really, in a sector dominated by stickers. In 2024, there was the first Card Show, so the first event dedicated to card collecting, and that was a sign of the maturity of a market that was finally waiting to have a place, even a concrete one, to meet and recognize each other. A place/event to gather. Also physically, because the beauty is in the exchange, the sharing, and the success of last night's Trade Night demonstrated that once again. And Card Fest is a new event, different from those that have taken place in recent years: in 2026 there will be at least three Card Shows in Italy. The market is changing very quickly.

What has been the Italian response? Again, in comparison with the United States: in Italy, historically, we are a bit more focused on a single sport.

Absolutely. In fact, our flagship license is UEFA, with all its competitions: Champions League, Europa League, and Conference League, as well as the European Championships until '28. Our core remains football. Obviously, however, we are positively surprised that other typically American sports like the NBA, whose license we resumed last year, are also working. There is always significant innovation. This year, in NBA products, you can find Debut Patches, which are those patches given to players making their first entry into the league: they are cut from the jersey and given to Topps to make a relic card.

From the website, I saw that you also have a wrestling collection and other collections on Marvel, Star Wars, etc. How is this line doing?

We have always had the entertainment sector, broadly speaking, so Marvel, Star Wars & Disney, Hobby products, only Premium products, and we will also launch new products this year simultaneously with movie releases. Wrestling is a bit more niche, but with WWE coming to Netflix, there could be a comeback. Years ago, we even published both stickers and TCGs for WWE wrestling. It can certainly bring good things, and as we said before, once you approach a world of collecting, you start wanting to try collecting a bit of everything, perhaps even sports that are not your main interest, just because some card is particularly beautiful.

In Italy, has anything changed in your approach since, it seems post-pandemic, the approach to collecting has also become a form of investment, in some way?

We held a masterclass at IULM last year; it was an educational masterclass on the world of collecting and sports cards specifically. And I must say it was a great way to spread some culture on the topic, because what we try to do is educate. The point, ultimately, is to collect. But because it's so beautiful and interesting to collect for all these reasons, every now and then we hold these panels precisely to compare different points of view, from the collector to the seller, to give the audience some background and some notions that might otherwise be missed.

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