Football 50p (2011)

As the lowest-mintage circulating design in the Olympic set, the Football 50p commands a premium even when worn, though condition still matters. Sharp diagram lines and readable lettering add to a circulated coin's value, while heavy wear that blurs the words takes it away. Brilliant uncirculated coins in the Royal Mint's Football coin card or the Football coin cover are worth more again. Because fakes exist, a coin with sound provenance sells more readily than an unchecked one.

With 1,125,500 struck for circulation, the Football 50p is the third rarest of the 81 ranked 50p designs and has the 41st lowest mintage of all 194 circulating UK designs. That puts it in the Scarce band, for mintages 1,000,000 to 2,499,999.

The next rarer 50p is the Kew Gardens 50p, with 210,000 struck, and the next more common is the Wrestling 50p, with 1,129,500 struck.

The offside rule 50p is easy to recognise because the reverse is a diagram with words on it: OFFSIDE EXPLAINED across the top of a half-pitch plan, with NOT OFFSIDE and OFFSIDE labelling the players, each with a small triangle. Above sits the London 2012 logo and below 50 PENCE, and the heads side is dated 2011. Its fame has attracted forgers, so check any coin that looks rough or blurred.

Neil Wolfson, a sports journalist, read about the coin design competition for London 2012 in the press and saw it as a natural extension of his work. A football fan who had followed the Premier League since it began, he was forever being asked to explain offside, so he decided the coin should do it. With so little room on a 50p, the idea had to be visual rather than wordy. He said the shapes chose themselves: a circle for the ball, triangles for the attacking side and squares for the defenders, and the tricky part was getting the proportions right. The reverse is a top-down plan of half a pitch under the heading OFFSIDE EXPLAINED, with arrows pointing to the player symbols. One triangle player is choosing to pass to another, and the labels NOT OFFSIDE and OFFSIDE sit beside two of them. Wolfson hoped the coin would start conversations and help people explain the rule. It carries the London 2012 logo at the top and was issued for circulation in 2011.

It was one of the 30 coins in the Olympic set issued in 2011.