A man has spent most of the last twenty years collecting American football cards in a corner of Edinburgh that tourists never really find. It is somewhere between the nice Georgian terraces and the quieter residential streets. Not football the way people in Edinburgh think of it. Not the sport that everyone in Scotland plays on Saturday afternoons, not the game that is played in the rain at Easter Road or Tynecastle. The different kind. The one with the helmets, shoulder pads, and playbooks that are hard to understand. His neighbors knew about it for years. Some of them still talk about it.
People on his street know his name, but he’s not the type to try to get attention. What interests people is how unlikely the thing is. There is a strong sense of sports identity in this city. You cheer for your team and watch the national team go through the expected ups and downs of hope and heartbreak. But you don’t usually spend your evenings sorting through laminated cards of men who play a sport that most Scots have only seen maybe twice in their lives.
Still, he’s here. From what he said, the collection began almost by accident. He has forgotten about a market stall in a city he used to work in and a job that took him to the US for a short time in the late 1990s. He also bought a small paper bag of cards on a whim for almost nothing. A story like this sounds too simple, but there’s no reason to doubt it. That’s how most collections start—not with a big plan, but with a moment of idle curiosity that never quite ends.
Whatever grew out of that afternoon is something that the collector seems to feel a mix of love and mild confusion about. Now there are binders carefully stacked in a spare room that has a smell of old cardboard and the slight chemical tang of plastic sleeves. There are rookie cards, game-worn jersey inserts, and autographs from players whose best years were played in stadiums across the Atlantic. It’s hard to give a reliable estimate of the value in terms of money. There are cards that aren’t worth much. It turns out that some of them are worth a lot more than what he paid for them.
The part about being interested in the area slowly crept in. He may not have thought much of showing a neighbor once. The neighbor told someone else about it. It seems like these things move around in smaller towns inside of cities. When an article about the collection was published in a local newsletter a few years ago, it had already gained a unique kind of fame in the neighborhood—the kind that is meant to be funny but never quite insulting, and sometimes even touching with admiration.
People might not be interested in the cards themselves, but in the promise that goes with them. The Scottish have a way of being that understands devotion to an unlikely cause. This is partly because of football allegiances that are inherited rather than chosen. We’ve all seen fans who stick with teams even though they don’t give them much in return, who show up in weather that no sensible person would choose, and who find community in their stubbornness. In some ways, the collector’s relationship with his binders is similar.
The strangest thing about him is that he doesn’t really care about the NFL. He knows a fair amount about the game and pays attention to the results when he remembers to, but the cards aren’t really about sports for him. They are things. They have feel, history, and the special pleasure of being held. That may or may not help you understand the habit, depending on who you ask.
Quirky people have always lived in Edinburgh. It’s not that the collector is weird in a dramatic way; he seems like a normal guy with some strange things on his shelves. But there is something really cute about how a city with so many sports traditions has made room for a collection of American football cards in an extra bedroom off a side street, even though no one really meant to. That wasn’t planned. It took place anyway.
