What is badge collecting ?
Football badge collecting itself is a fairly recent phenomenon, first gaining widespread popularity amongst fans in the late 60s early 70s and then growing into the massive business it is now.
Badge collecting in general has been around for years, in fact compared to other areas football badge collecting (on a large scale) is a relatively young hobby.
There are thousands of other badges out there from different genres, military badges being one of the biggest and it certainly outdates football. Even Butlins has its own massive collector circle with some of the prices being reached for rare editions being astronomical.
But its obviously football badges we are concentrating on as it’s a footy site !!!
So, you would think that the obvious area for football badge collectors is their your own team but you would be wrong, although the majority of people do concentrate on their own particular football team there is other specialised areas such as FA Stewards badges, Referees badges, International badges, Football Association badges, County FA’s etc
We will be setting up some websites covering the specialised areas in the near future but for the moment this particular site is concentrating on the usual suspects, that is teams from the Premiership (the old FIRST division) to Non League …. oh yeah, by the way as hinted above football was invented before the introduction of the Premiership, despite what Sky Sports would have you believe !!
So where do you start?
Well if you go to matches you will no doubt have seen the “badgeman” stood on a corner somewhere, this is the guy I blame for getting me started and who ultimately led to me spending thousands of pounds on football badges !!
Hes a good start, then there’s the club shop (although most clubs have a very small range) or you could try going to programme and badge fayres around the country where you can pick up some good deals, ultimately though the best (and easiest) place to expand your collection is the internet which of course usually means Ebay, to this end we have set up on each individual teams page a search tool specifically for that team.
In the early stages of your collection this is definitely the best way to grow your numbers, but be careful though, a lot of the badges on Ebay are very common so don’t be going over the top with the amount you pay, you will usually find that what you think is a “rare” badge (and never believe that description off a seller without careful investigation) will always come back up for sale in the next few days or weeks.
Obviously as you get more experienced you will recognise the real rare badges and these are well worth spending your hard earned on, just be careful in the early days as there are a lot of people out there who will take over the odds for a badge that they have paid pennies for and there is nothing more frustrating and annoying than seeing the same badge that you have just spent good money on being sold over and over again by the same seller …. believe me Ive been there !!
So if you’ve got this far down the page without being bored you are either already into collecting badges or are seriously interested in starting a collection, either way, best of luck but please don’t get in my way when I’m bidding !!
I do usually have loads of badges for sale in my Ebay store, if your interested in checking them out just follow the link – Footybits Ebay Store