Topps Premier League 2026 Checklist Guide: Subsets, Rookies and Chase Cards

Updated 27 September 2026 · by the Swappies team

Topps Premier League 2026 is a 450-card trading card set covering all 20 Premier League clubs. Only just over half of it is base cards - the rest is spread across eleven subsets, from Rookies and Team Badges to Pro Partnership pairs and Tekker. This guide explains how the set is built, what is in each subset and what finishing it really takes.

How the 450 cards break down

The backbone of the set is 240 base cards - twelve per club on average across the 20 clubs. On top of that sit 210 cards in named subsets:

Rookie - 40 cards, the largest subset, for young players breaking into first teams.
Team Badge - 20 cards, one per club.
Pro Partnership - 20 cards, each showing two players on one card, such as William Saliba and Gabriel at Arsenal or Moises Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez at Chelsea.
Pro Precision, Retro Threads, Beast Mode, Full Force and Generation Now - 20 cards each.
Headlines, Breakthrough Baller and Tekker - 10 cards each, the smallest subsets in the set.

Every card, grouped by subset and numbered, is on our Topps Premier League 2026 checklist.

What is in a packet

A retail packet holds 10 cards, and Topps puts at least three inserts in each one - so a packet is not ten base cards with the odd special. That is good news for anyone chasing subsets, but it also means base cards and subset cards turn up side by side, and you will be sorting doubles from the very first packet.

Which cards are hardest to find

On our own rarity scale, the Pro Partnership cards are the scarcest in this set. That is a guide based on what passes through our hands, not an official print run - Topps does not publish those - but the two-player cards are the ones we see least often. Pairings include Amadou Onana and Youri Tielemans, Antoine Semenyo and Dango Ouattara, and Daichi Kamada and Adam Wharton.

What finishing the set takes

Collecting follows the same curve every time. If every one of the 450 cards were equally likely, you would need to open about 3,000 cards - roughly 300 packets of 10 - on average before you had one of each.

The effort is badly lopsided. The first 80% of the set (360 different cards) takes around 720 cards on average, because almost everything you open is new. The last 20% takes around 2,300 more, because by then nearly every card you pull is one you already have. And that is the best case: if some subsets are scarcer than others, the real number is higher.

If you only want the 240 base cards, the same maths still bites: around 1,450 cards on average, with the last 48 base cards alone taking over 1,000 of them.

Tips for Premier League collectors

Collect by club first. A club's base cards and its badge make a satisfying mini-set, and it keeps a young collector motivated long before the whole set is done.
Check the number, not the name. The same player can appear in the base set and in one or more subsets, so "a Cole Palmer" is not one card. Our checklist is by number.
Sleeve the inserts. Special finishes scratch easily, so protect the insert cards as they come out of the packet.
Swap early, buy late. Doubles are worth most while everyone is still opening packets. Once you are down to the last few dozen, buying singles beats opening another hundred packets.
Send your doubles in one parcel. We buy Topps Premier League 2026 cards. Because you pay the postage to us - about R49 - we take sell offers from R100, so save your doubles and send them together.

Getting your cards

We are a collectables shop, not a marketplace: we buy and sell singles ourselves and deliver across South Africa to PUDO lockers. Stock on this set comes and goes as collectors sell to us, so check the checklist for what we have in right now.

Finish your Topps Premier League 2026

Paste the numbers you are missing on the checklist and we add every one we have in stock - one order, delivered anywhere in South Africa.

Open the checklist Sell us your doubles