I am sure if you are a collector of Corinthian football figures, then you will be very much aware of the Tetley Tea figures, however what you may not be aware of the set of 4 Unreleased Christmas Baubles.

 

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The 4 figures are David Seaman for Arsenal, Gianfranco Zola for Chelsea, Paul Ince for Liverpool and Alan Shearer for Newcastle United. They are the standard Tetley Tea figures but painted into their respective club kits and then placed into a plastic bauble! The figures do not have any code stamped onto the under side of the base.

 

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These figures will have been produced during the time of the Tetley Tea promotion and i can only guess at how they would have been released, it is possible they would have been a special promotion towards the festive period, it is also plausible that they were just a sample product to determine how feasible producing an item of that nature would prove to be.

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I am unsure as to how many sets were actually created, they appeared on Ebay with the seller having very limited stocks of each, my assumption must be that he acquired the stock when Corinthian ceased trading and simply had them in storage and re discovered them during a stock take.

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The figures do not fall into the released collection and I personally class them as unreleased samples, akin to Master Models, Paint Masters, Tool Masters and any other sample or test figure.

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I do feel it somewhat ironic that a figure so common and mass produced as the Tetley Tea figures are, could lead to some of the rarest figures ever created by Corinthian. They are incredibly rare and certain something for the long term and die hard collector.

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The figures imaged here are from my personal collection.