Philadelphia Gum Football (1964-1967): The NFL Set Topps Did Not Make

Quick facts

How Philadelphia Gum football was sold

Wax packs

The five-cent wax pack holds five cards and a stick of gum, and there were penny packs in the early years as well. This is the format that surfaces most often, usually as a single graded pack rather than in quantity. Graded 1967 wax packs have generally changed hands in the $400-$700 range, and 1964 through 1966 packs sit broadly in the same band with individual results reaching higher when a well-centred key card shows through.

Cello packs and cello boxes

The ten-cent cello pack holds twelve cards under clear cellophane, boxed 36 packs to a display. Cello is the format where the visible-card premium bites: a pack showing a Gale Sayers or Dick Butkus front card is a different item from a pack showing two guards. A single 1967 cello pack is reported to have sold for $1,228 in 2018, and full cello boxes remain scarce despite a small warehouse find that surfaced in the 1980s.

Rack packs

Rack packs cost twenty-nine cents and hold 36 cards behind a header card with a punch hole for department-store pegboards. They are the most visually striking Philadelphia format and the most expensive per unit. Public results include roughly $2,390 for a standard 1967 rack in 2012 and about $3,182 in 2007 for the scarcer Card Collectors Club variation. Those are old sales, and the current market is thin enough that they should be read as historical reference points, not as today's price.

Display boxes and full wax boxes

Empty Philadelphia display boxes trade as standalone collectibles. Complete unopened wax boxes are the genuine rarity: only a small number are known, they surface at long intervals, and there is no reliable public sold-price series for them. If you are quoted a price on a full Philadelphia wax box, there is effectively nothing to check it against, which is exactly why authentication matters more here than anywhere else in 1960s football.

Key years: prices and landmark rookies

Ranges below are indicative August 2026 levels for authenticated or third-party graded material. Sample sizes are small in every year.

The 1966 set is the one that drives the whole run. Sayers and Butkus rookies in the same 198-card checklist is as strong a single-set pairing as 1960s football offers, and it pulls sealed 1966 material above the other three years even though print quantities were broadly similar. 1965 is the connoisseur's year, with six Hall of Fame rookies including Warfield and Charley Taylor, and it is arguably underpriced relative to 1966 on a per-Hall-of-Famer basis. 1964 carries the historical weight as the set that broke the Topps monopoly, and 1967 is the closing chapter, valuable more for its rack and cello formats than for its checklist.

Chase cards, short prints and set structure

There are no inserts, parallels, autographs or numbered cards anywhere in Philadelphia football. Every set is 198 cards laid out by team, thirteen cards per club: eleven players, a team photo and a diagrammed play card, followed by checklists at the end. The structural quirk worth knowing is that the checklist cards were frequently marked up by kids, so unmarked high-grade checklists are far tougher than their print run suggests. Centring is the usual condition problem across all four years, and the 1966 green-backed cards show wear at the corners readily.

Is Philadelphia Gum football worth buying sealed?

Sealed Philadelphia is a collector purchase, not an expected-value trade. The pull maths are poor by modern standards: a five-card pack against a 198-card checklist means a Sayers or Butkus rookie is a long shot, and the cards that do come out will need luck on centring to grade. What you are buying is a genuinely scarce object from a four-year window that can never be extended. Liquidity is the honest drawback. There are weeks when nothing trades, comparable sales can be a decade old, and a single motivated bidder can set what looks like a market price. Size positions accordingly and prefer graded or authenticated pieces you can resell without argument.

How to spot fakes and resealed packs

Philadelphia wax is old enough that the wrappers are brittle and the wax is discoloured, and any pack that looks fresh should raise an eyebrow immediately. Resealing tells are the same as elsewhere in vintage: an unusually even seam, a slight sheen where heat was applied, wax that does not match the yellowing on the rest of the wrapper, and end folds that sit flatter than an untouched pack. Because Philadelphia packs are worth hundreds of dollars each, the incentive to search a box, remove the good packs and reseal the rest is real.

Two protections matter. First, buy authenticated: BBCE-certified packs and boxes, or packs encapsulated by a grading service, carry a substantial premium over raw sealed for the simple reason that the premium is buying you the examination. Second, treat raw and authenticated as separate markets rather than the same item at different prices. A raw Philadelphia box priced anywhere near an authenticated one is a warning, not a bargain. Verify the wrapper year matches the box, since the four designs are similar enough at a glance to allow substitution.

Where to buy Philadelphia Gum football sealed

This material moves through specialist dealers and auction houses rather than general retail. Working the card shop directory is worthwhile because vintage-focused shops often know who locally owns unopened 1960s football. Card shows let you inspect wax under good light and ask the seller about provenance, which is the single most useful question with this material. For online searching:

• 1966 Philadelphia Football unopened wax pack PSA
• 1967 Philadelphia Football rack pack
• Philadelphia Gum Football cello pack BBCE