Recent influx of 'match badges' from the Ukraine - thoughts?

[Dorking]

Of course, everyone's views on what they do and don't collect are different, and of course, non badge collectors (eg programme collectors) view unofficial 'match badges' as worthless rubbish (not saying they haven't got a point, nevertheless beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyhow, in the last few months a seller from Ukraine has been churning out at regular intervals a steady supply of random match badges from games over the last 2 of 3 seasons. As I say, all a bit random really - no pattern to the games concerned.

The 'designs' are alright I suppose, pretty standard fayre, even if are totally breaching all copyright rules.

Having bought a few, the badge quality is a bit iffy - very thin metal, and a kind of stamped/printed or painted finish.

I can only assume they are very cheap to produce as several have literally been one-offs, sold with a starting price of £4.90 and never repeated.

As I say, I've got a few Palace ones which I am happy with, even if they have obviously been made and sold a couple of years after the games concerned. But I can't seem to justify to myself paying much more than the starting price for them as they just seem 'fake' to me - mainly due to them being churned out to tempt 'have to have it' type collectors like myself. If I paid big money for one (I won't) I'd feel a little bit exploited, if that's not too dramatic a description of it.

Any other collectors seen them, got any, and have similar thoughts??

[bigearl79]

Not noticed any of these badges myself, so I'm guessing they haven't got to us smaller clubs. I'm happy to buy badges for special games but not for bog standard games. I noticed when we were in the championship a lot of clubs do badges for every game. Certainly Leeds and Leicester were in 2008-09 when we played them in League One.

[Wullie]

I'm not really a badge collector but I can see they would appeal to a Collectomaniac. What I have learnt over the years is the importance ( for me with a limited budget ) is to buy value. Those £3/£4s add up to a huge sum in the end. And what have you got at the end of the day ? A room full of junk you can't get rid of, once you get bored with it. If you have unlimited funds , a big house and these bring you real pleasure then they are fine. Personally I'm at the stage now where I won't be buying anything unless it's rare and a decent price.( Just picked up a pre war home for £50) I can no longer afford £5 here £5 there on modern junk.

[bisphamseasider]

There have been a lot of similar produced ones from Poland over the last few years featuring comepetitions such as the Anglo Scottish Cup, Anglo Italian Cup, play offs and prestige friendlies abroad for British clubs.

Starting price of these in most cases is a little higher I think.

They look reasonably OK and for the completist collector they are probably a must have, but basically they are unofficial mass produced c**p and sometimes with wrong club badges/emblems for the era they are depicting.

Still if people continue to buy them they will continue to make them.

[Wullie]

What about two teams on the one scarf ? A recent trend , normally domestic cup games and European games . Why would a supporter wear a scarf with opposition colours on it ? Just plain stupid I think. More money than sense comes to mind. As I say , a fiver here a fiver there. Crazy

[bisphamseasider]

Wullie wrote:

What about two teams on the one scarf ? A recent trend , normally domestic cup games and European games . Why would a supporter wear a scarf with opposition colours on it ? Just plain stupid I think. More money than sense comes to mind. As I say , a fiver here a fiver there. Crazy

Could you imagine fans buying them in the 70s and 80s?

They'd get a battering from their own fans let alone the opposition.

I suppose it does show though how things have progressed since those dark days, although I still can't imagine a Blackpool fan having a scarf with PNE on the other end.

[bigearl79]

I have half and half scarves for the two games we played at Wembley in 2009, the FA Cup tie against Man City in 2010 and the League Cup against Man United, the same year. Never worn any of them and never will. Don't go out of my way to buy such items. I'm guessing the lower down the leagues you go the less these item's get produced, due to demand. I did notice Morecambe produced a half and half scarf for their game with Portsmouth last season. I couldn't imagine buying that.

[seand]

It's not often as issue for me but I did recently pick up a couple of match badges on eBay which were definitely not available at the time of the match for Dundalk's European games in 2010. The same seller (producer?) had a ton of modern Irish interest badges for European games which makes sense in some ways, as these are among the biggest club games in the country. What I found strange was that he also had a small seemingly random selection of clearly modern badges made up for some Euro ties from 20 to 30 years ago. Still, if he threw together a badge for Dundalk v Vasas 67 I'd probably buy it!

If someone in Ukraine starts making random match specific League of Ireland badges I think I'd have to draw the line there... well after picking up the first few anyway! By the time you pay 4 quid for a novelty item plus 2 quid for postage, and do it 5 times or 10 times it all adds up.

[seand]

On half-and-half scarves, I think the trend came from the continent, Germany in particular. There's a long(ish) history of semi-official friendships between various Bundesliga sides....actually I'll leave it to the ever-brilliant Guardian "Knowledge" column....

http://www.theguardian.com/foo.....ith-rivals

Half-and-half scarves were big business as the 2006 World Cup (I have a Togo-Switzerland one) and I can understand it as a souvenir for a non-league club v Premier League club friendly/cup game. But you see them for run of the mill Premier League games nowadays which just beggars belief.

[Dorking]

Thanks for all your thoughts, kind of sums it up for me.

I do have some of the Anglo Italian ones mentioned featuring my club and they too were produced years later. Some of the crests are indeed historically wrong for the time too. Grrr!

To be honest I have no problem going to an away game and buying a few different colourways of a match badge, but buying a match badge that has clearly been made a couple of years later is a weird one, and something I can't quite make my mind up about.

Only times I have been tempted into buying a 'half and half' scarf were:-

- after (note after!) Palace won 2-1 in the League Cup away at Man United. Kind of like taking a 'scalp' (Palace were a Championship team at the time so it was a big deal then). Scarf sellers were desperate to shift them as I don't think many Man Utd fans would have bought one at that point!

- when I took my son to his first England away game in Poland. Obviously he has the programme and ticket stub, but the scarf was irresistible as it would be much harder to find after the event, so I just had to have it as a spur of the moment souvenir to take home.

They are available for probably about a third of our premier league fixtures though - mainly the sellers expect to sell them to 'football tourists' - Japanese, Scandinavians, americans etc

Its so much easier for programme collectors - always an official programme every game, so the only time they have such a dilemma is a game abroad where there is nothing official, but a pirate programme, or even more of a dilemma a reproduction of a media guide!!

[littlewiggy]

bisphamseasider wrote:

There have been a lot of similar produced ones from Poland over the last few years featuring comepetitions such as the Anglo Scottish Cup, Anglo Italian Cup, play offs and prestige friendlies abroad for British clubs. Starting price of these in most cases is a little higher I think. They look reasonably OK and for the completist collector they are probably a must have, but basically they are unofficial mass produced c**p and sometimes with wrong club badges/emblems for the era they are depicting. Still if people continue to buy them they will continue to make them.

Yes I've bought all of those same Polish issues featuring my club in Europe too Seasider, the prices are a tad steep I agree, but they're just another nice example of what has been produced for County.

Another example if you like of the weird and wonderful world of football badges that I like to see represented in my Newport County stash.

They are what they are, not terribly high in production value, but not without their own slice of charm either. It all depends on how the individual views them I guess.

Badges like the 1970s 'inserts' were basically poor quality too, as have been many others, but they're amongst my personal favourites.
Quality doesn't always equate to desirability does it.

I'd buy others were they unofficially produced too, my only gripe being that I wish they weren't of the stick pin variety, as I'm not too fussed on those. But seeing as I'd never wear the buggers, I guess that isn't terribly important ...

(the bottom one even has our wrong crest on, lol)

[seand]

I see a host of current season Europa League match badges appearing on eBay now from Ukraine, including Hajduk v Dundalk. I'll not be buying at £5 plus post though. There's also some really awful cheap looking match specific button badges coming out of Belarus. Look very much like a colour printer and pritt-stick job.

[littlewiggy]

This was another Polish / or maybe German issue I bought on eBay in recent years (I forget which), but this one was pleasantly of the higher quality, embossed, enamel variety - with correct crests too!

It's still weird to see Newport County nestled there, amongst the more illustrious crests of AS Roma, Valencia & Real Madrid.

Don't think I'll ever see that happen again ...

[Dorking]

Loving the Newport badges. Thanks for sharing.

[badge collectors center]

There's been a long tradition in eastern Europe, even going back to Soviet times, of collectors producing their own souvenirs and selling them at matches -- especially if there's a foreign team involved. Not only pins, but unofficial (pirate) programmes and wimples. I once knew a guy in Minsk who I bumped into at a match between Dynamo Kyiv and Bayern Munchen with a bunch of wimples he made just for the match. Clearly he must have made enough to pay for the train ticket, else we wouldn't be doing that.

I just spent some time in Kyiv, and the traidtion of sports collectors there still exists, but not as much as it was fifteen years ago. Programs and tickets are the big items. There are guys who will buy-up the entire run of programs before the match, and sell them at a markup (which is something that the clubs can do something about). Some pins being produced, but not like Soviet times where "znatchky" of every kind were ubiquitous. Pins for some Eurocups games that I attended that I have seen subsequently on eBay were not/not seen around the stadium.

I agree that the quality isn't always that high, but I still have to give props to the guys who are working hard to put this stuff out, and I'm happy to support them. I did see scarves and quality pins for clubs in the Ukrainian Second Division (third-level) which was a nice surprise. The Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk - FC Copenhagen match had a match scarf available from the club (the game was in Kyiv).

This entrepreneurship isn't limited to that part of the world. A couple of years ago I was in Sweden and going to exhibition hockey games between Swedish and NHL clubs, and there were a couple of English guys selling unofficial match scarves for something like £10 a piece. They said that they had made up a couple of hundred of these and had driven up from England. They were quality scarves and had "Made in England" lables on them. Sweden does not have the tradition of vendors selling stuff outside the stadium, it's all done at club shops, so this was nice to see.

[Dorking]

(Wimples = pennants)

Thanks for the interesting post, yes, I too am always happy to buy unofficial merchandise at grounds if the designs are interesting and the quality is reasonable. The club shops themselves are rarely keen to produce stuff for one-off games, leaving a gap in the market for enterprising types, and good luck to them I say.

Chugging out stuff for the ebay market though doesn't hold quite the full appeal as getting an unusual pennant, badge or other item at a game in my opinion, but sometimes it does fill a gap, and the items are often more interesting than standard 'official' merchandise.

[bisphamseasider]

Dorking wrote:

(Wimples = pennants)

You learn something everyday.

I thought a wimple was one of those hats which had side pieces that covered the ears and fastened under the chin.

[Valky]

I would not touch these badges with a disinfected bargepole unless you managed to get them for £1 each or they were officially produced.
I now only try to buy older badges missing from my collection or officially produced club badges.
As for half and half scarves... holy cow... at Chelsea they aren't even use official club crests due to copyright infringements so you are just left with tat.
Have learnt my lesson with the value of many of these things too although I initially started to collect for the love of it. And it has turned into an obsession!

[littlewiggy]

Dorking wrote:

Loving the Newport badges. Thanks for sharing.

Cheers Dorking.

I appreciate that these unofficial pins aren't for everybody's tastes, but beggars can't be choosers when you support a team like Newport!!!
lol