Upper Deck helping to grow card collecting in Europe, internationally

The NHL has returned to Europe for the first time since 2019, with the San Jose Sharks and Nashville Predators set to open the regular season with games in Prague on Friday and Saturday as part of the 2022 NHL Global Series.

Like most hockey fans in North America, European fans had to find a way to fill the void when the COVID-19 pandemic caused the 2019-20 season to come to an abrupt halt.
With people spending more time indoors than usual, the Upper Deck Company needed to come up with new ways for fans to connect with their favorite teams and players. Card collecting was one way to do so.
"People were -- for lack of a better term -- sort of trapped for an extended period of time," said Michael Phillips, Upper Deck executive vice president of sales and marketing. "Which brought them back to some of their former hobbies, endeavors and things like that, and it brought a whole new generation of collectors in addition to reengaging with a huge amount of lapse collectors.
"Since they last looked at them, many people started a family, introduced their kids to trading cards, showed them the trading cards that they collected when they were younger."
Upper Deck, which extended its exclusive partnership with the NHL and NHL Players' Association last year, has also looked to find new ways to present its products to the younger demographic, including creating an authentic, virtual experience and excitement of opening a new pack of trading cards.
Some of that is on display this week in Bern, Switzerland, Berlin and Prague, during the 2022 NHL Global Challenge and Global Series.
Fans are being offered an in-person experience at the Global Games Tour including personalized trading cards that they can create and take home along with physical cards of their favorite NHL players, such as native favorites David Pastrnak and Jaromir Jagr.

"[The fans] are very aware of the impact that their legends have had on the game there," Phillips said. "I've even seen imagery of people, at believe it or not, card shows because there are even card shows there that happened on weekends, of people walking around in vintage jerseys of former NHL players that are from the region."
But whether it's North America or Europe, Upper Deck's commitment remains to ensure that card collecting continues to flourish.
"We feel a very strong responsibility to now make sure we keep those new collectors and those now reenergized lapse collectors engaged," Phillips said.
"We also are doing quite a bit of [virtual reality] digital platforms. We have a platform called 'Upper Deck e-Pack', where collectors, if they can't get physical boxes and packs of cards at their local hobby shop, they can go on Upper Deck e-Pack and have the same exact experience of opening up a physical pack of cards on their phone, on their tablet, on their computer with the same inserts, the same cards per pack, the same content as they would (get in) a physical pack. So they can actually have that experience regardless of where they are."
For European hockey fans, the virtual and traditional experience is beginning to grow into even more of a global pastime, which will only increase with the opening of the 2022-23 NHL season.
"We're really, really seeing tremendous growth particularly in places like the Czech Republic," Phillips said. "We've always had a pretty good collector base in Finland and Sweden and in Germany as well. They continue to grow, but the leader of the pack right now is absolutely the Czech Republic.
"Fortunately for us, there are a number of stops on the Global Series Tour. We're engaging with our partners there to get out and participate and engage with collectors and stoke that passion for collecting."
The surge in collectors globally figures to continue, especially as passion for the sport increases.
"As interest in the category grows and interest in the sport has grown, we've seen hockey trading cards grow year over year in places where we had never seen that before.," Phillip said. "We'll continue, and personally for me as the head of sales, I have been concentrating on that more than most things because I see it as such a tremendous opportunity to create and grow new collector bases and further interest in the game."