This card showed Glenn Hoddle, who was born in September. More about him in the newsletter, as well as a bit more about the story of the "Football Poster" card.
By the way, to save you hunting for hours like I have been, you will find that the number of the card is inside the football, near the top.
Now curiously it seems that September (and October and November) has the highest number of footballer birthdays than the rest of the year, and also they are more likely to be top ones. I am not sure why this is but I wonder if whether this makes them just that bit older when they are of the age to join a football team. If you think about it football starts up again after the summer break in August, so if a player had been born in September of a previous year they would be almost a year older than a player who had been born in the July of that same previous year. A bit like racehorses, whose birthdays are all counted as being on January 1st, whether it was actually on December 31st or January 2nd.
Unless anyone can suggest another reason why September is just a good month for footballing skills?
Now this item is not really a card at all, just paper, and it was printed as one sheet and then folded into four to fit the packets. So now we can reveal why there are those curious grey lines on this card - which are creases.
Also the set is not actually called "Footballers - Posters", it is just that there is no mention of any title on the front or back, and it had to be called something. If we are being technical then we could argue that this item is way too small to be classed as a poster, and "folders" or "fold-outs" would have been much more accurate.
Now this item only appears in our British Trade Index part three, or RB.31, published in 1986. And it is described there as :
"Footballers - Posters. (A) 178 x 126, on paper. Nd. (18). Inscribed "1980 Topps Chewing Gum Inc." Plain back.