That First MLS Season / The 1997 Upper Deck MLS Collection- Official PSA Thread
OneDaysRide
Posts: 141 ✭✭✭
That First MLS Season: The Cards, the Chase, and the Memories
As the world’s most widely followed sport, soccer found new professional footing in the United States when Major League Soccer launched in 1996. The success of the 1994 World Cup, played across nine U.S. host cities, helped create the foundation for a new ten-team league with a bold look and a fresh destination for American soccer stars to earn their stripes.
I was the father of two soccer-playing kids, a lifelong recreational player, and a front-row season ticket holder for the first-ever Major League Soccer season. For me, it began with 32,864 fans at our first home game on April 27 and ended with MLS Cup at our stadium on October 20, when D.C. United beat the LA Galaxy 3-2 in a nor’easter downpour. What a year!
The season itself was unforgettable, but the thing that kept pulling me back to 1996 was smaller, stranger, and easier to store: the first national set of MLS trading cards.
That summer, at the 1996 MLS All-Star Game, with 78,416 passionate spectators, MLS revealed their first step into the sports card world. Two All-Star Game Promo cards were given to attendees featuring Cobi Jones, Carlos Valderrama and Roy “Lights Out” Lassiter. On the back of one card was the following message: “Major League Soccer has quickly established itself as the world class professional outdoor soccer league. With the introduction of Major League Soccer Trading Cards, the last frontier for serious collectors is here. Sure to grow in value, MLS Trading Cards are on the cutting-edge of the sports collectable market … be a part of it.”
By April 1997, Upper Deck began offering the first national set of cards to feature Major League Soccer. These Upper Deck 1996 Inaugural Season MLS cards celebrated the ten inaugural teams, the players, the team captains, the trophy winners, the uniforms, the crazy logos and vibe of that first season. I remember thinking to myself, “Hey self, imagine having the first set of cards for MLB, NBA, NHL or NFL? Did they even have cards for those first seasons? I wonder if I can find that out on Alta Vista?”
I worked with a local sports card shop in the hopes of finding every card for “That First MLS Season”: the 1997 Upper Deck MLS Collection. We managed to find 124 of the 125 cards, inspected each one carefully, and slid them into protective album sheets to stand the test of time.
Sadly, Upper Deck found scant sales for their new MLS product. MLS soccer fans apparently had little connection to the long-standing sports card worlds of baseball, football, hockey and basketball. Later that year, Upper Deck abandoned plans to expand the collection with additional base set and insert set cards.
So unimpressed with the demand for soccer cards, Upper Deck cancelled production of MLS cards the following season. Wait, WHAT? There was no national set of cards featuring the 1997 Major League Soccer season? Correct. While a few team-issued local sets appeared in 1997, Upper Deck did not return with an MLS product until 1999, when it showcased the 1998 season.
Unfortunately, with that lag, I never regained interest in pursuing additional MLS cards. Since my mom had thrown away all my 1960’s sports cards and comic books, the inaugural season set was the only card collection I now possessed.
Ten years later I stumbled on an online seller who happened to have my missing holy grail card: the S5 Gold Signature Jorge Campos! My card life was now complete.
Meanwhile, the 1997 Upper Deck MLS set began appearing on the PSA Set Registry in 2011, when a collector from Maine published a 51-card graded base set. That same member added the first gold border base set and two insert sets in 2012. A new member from Texas published the same two insert sets in 2018, overtaking the original member in the rankings, and another new member from Florida published a higher-ranking base set and gold base set in 2019. Gotta love the Set Registry.
Then it happened. Twenty-five years after That First MLS Season, the 2020 Sports Card Pandemic swept across the globe. Like its Covid cousin, this virus infected its hosts with a desire to descend into the basement and rummage for old collectibles. I happened to be sheltering in place when I rediscovered my old MLS memorabilia: a first-year team-signed game ball, a first-year Alexi Lalas autographed game jersey, and my complete first-year MLS card collection. Apparently, I was now one of 36 million people trying to decide whether to send sports cards off to PSA for grading.
I scoured YouTube and the PSA Forums to learn how collectors evaluate and prepare cards for grading. While I had hoped to borrow my friend’s electron transmission microscope, I settled for a bench-mounted magnifying glass, a high-powered light, and archive gloves. I reviewed every corner, edge, angle, and surface, graded each card on a 1-10 scale in a spreadsheet, then packed the collection and shipped it coast to coast from Boston to sunny downtown Newport Beach on August 15, 2020.
After an astounding 45 weeks, at only $9 per card, my graded collection finally returned home – where I waited an additional 24 weeks for the last two sets to be added to the Set Registry. My slabbed 125 card collection, featuring 15 Hall of Famers and all five of the rare Gold Signature cards were a thing of beauty.
That long wait changed the collection from a keepsake into a challenge. Once the cards were slabbed, registered, and ranked, I started seeing the set less as a finished album and more as a living project.
The next quest was finding the highest-grade examples, upgrading my rank in the PSA Set Registry, getting each of the 50 base cards autographed by those 1996 pioneers of American soccer, and having those signatures PSA/DNA authenticated and encapsulated.
New additions to my “That First MLS Season” collection include several PSA-graded sealed packs, an Upper Deck shrink-wrapped sealed box, those rare 1996 All-Star Game promo cards, and PSA-graded full tickets to the first ever game on April 13th and the MLS Cup championship final game on October 20th.
While the chase is unimaginably fun, these cards bring back tons of great memories with my soccer playing friends who shared tickets and tailgates to those early games. It was also great fun meeting so many of the very accessible 1996 players at games, season ticket holder events, and supporter group meetings.
As for MLS, it is flourishing as it heads into its 31st season in 2026, with 30 teams: 27 in the U.S. and three in Canada. Most teams now play in soccer-specific stadiums, and MLS has the third-highest average attendance among U.S. sports leagues, behind football and baseball. MLS momentum grew even further after the FIFA World Cup returned to North America in the summer of 2026, hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico which reportedly reached billions of viewers worldwide.
Wishing you all the best in your own collector’s universe, wherever the chase takes you.
OneDaysRide
Comments
Alexi Lalas, 'The most recognizable US Soccer player ever' according to his Upper Deck card in 1996 -- But somehow, they errored by inserting the player position, height, weight, birthdate and team of card #1, Marcelo Balboa, on to the back of every base and parallel Alexi Lalas card ever printed. The correct stats for Alexi Lalas only appear on his hard-to-find unnumbered promo card, a two-card set shared with Carlos Valderrama, issued in a Bandai promo pack along with Power Rangers, Dragon Ball Z and NASCAR offerings.
Recently submitted my autographed 1997 Upper Deck MLS regular cards to PSA for authentication through a PSA Forum group submission. This 50-card set, of which I have 48 autos, depicts five players each from the original 10 teams in their 1996 inaugural season. As expected, all 48 were returned as authentic! Couldn't be happier as most of these autographs were personally obtained. The rest came from a verified local autograph seeker who would go to the visiting team's hotel lobby back in the day. Now if I could just locate the final two cards ...
A friend recently shared this wonderful 8.5 x 11 sell sheet of 'That First MLS Season' cards. A valiant effort by Upper Deck to boost sales and awareness for their new sports card product and this fledgling league. They also spelled inaugural wrong
A four month turnaround on this 27 year old beauty. It wasn't until I started submitting my entire collection to PSA that I realized 'pack grading' was even a thing. Happy to get a Mint 9 ...
Interesting read. Thank you for sharing!
What would this collection be without a UD logo shrink-wrapped sealed box of 1997 Upper Deck MLS?
Likely very few boxes left. I know of only five other boxes -- Bryan, Robert, Jeff, Jimmy, Cynthia, maybe a sixth?
The 1996 Inaugural MLS Season! Just got my 49th of 50 authenticated autographed cards (Jean Harbor!) returned from PSA. Those first-year players were a special bunch. Need to focus on getting that last autograph -- Jorge Rodas #13 San Jose Clash, currently living in Guatemala -- who only played that first season, and was gone by the time these cards appeared in the spring of 1997.
Thanks for sharing, great collection! This is why i still check these forums out!
While you are right that Upper Deck did not produce a 1998 MLS set, there are various card sets that feature the 1997 MLS season that were issued by/as regional Team-Issue sets.
I love this thread and am so incredibly impressed with your collection. Thanks for sharing.
I've seen some of those smaller regional issues. Love how someone, somewhere, has managed to collect those gems. Perhaps they're even more special given the missing national card presence.
Very kind of you to share your thoughts. It's been my pleasure. I've enjoyed seeing interest grow in this set across various Facebook card groups, having other collectors assist with auto's/upgrades/challenges -- with new collectors still joining the Set Registry!
Busy times for 'That First MLS Season', courtesy of 130point.com ...
I have two 👍
That is awesome! How did you come by these almost 30-year-old treasures?
I've had them since release. I had another box that I opened over the years but I can't find it 🙁