Prostars series 3 was Corinthian's first legend only series and featured 12 England legends, both past and present. The name aptly given to this series was 'England Legends' as that is exactly what this series was.

 Released in early September 1999, this set was made up of 12 of the greatest players ever to wear the England shirt. The reason for this foray into legends was simple, summer transfers! It takes around 6 months for Corinthian to produce a figure ready to be sold and as the summer transfer market can be very unpredictable, it made Corinthians job of releasing a range for the start of the new season incredibly difficult, unless they simply released the same players again from the big teams. The answer was to release a range of legends, an idea which was originally put to Corinthian by the collectors themselves, further proof that Corinthian always took on board the thoughts and comments of it's collectors.

 4 of the figures from this series had previously been released a few weeks earlier as part of the England 1966 12-player pack, those 4 of course being Gordon Banks, Geoff Hurst, Bobby Charlton and Bobby Moore, complete with the Jules Rimet trophy in hand. The Moore was again released in the Red away kit but the other 3 were instead painted in the traditional White 3 lion’s kit.

 From the other 8 in the series 4 had been previously, the others had not been released before. Brian Robson had been released for Middlesboro as part of the original FAPL Collection, as had Alan Shearer, although this was an entirely new sculpt. Paul Gascoigne was re sculpted from the Rangers SPL Collection range, this time he was sculpted with his trademark cheeky grin, personally this is one of my all time favourite figures, not only is it a great likeness of the player but it also captures the player character and personality. King Kev was released, permed hair and all, for the second time as he has previously been released in the FAPL Collection as manager of Newcastle United, it has to be said that this series 3 version is by a long way a better sculpt, it actually looks like the man himself.

 The 4 first time releases were goal poacher extraordinaire Gary Lineker, a really great sculpt of him too, ears could have been a bit bigger though! The other 3 were of players from the 1950's, wing wizard Stanley Matthews, Nat Lofthouse and Tim Finney, maybe not known to the younger collectors but the 'old school' collectors certainly recognised them.

 Corinthian took a very cautious and sensible approach to production volumes on this series, mostly due to the fact they were just unsure how popular this series would prove to be, as a result the quantities produced were much less than any other Prostars series released up to that point, infact it was near half the amount that was produced for series 1 & 2 blisters!

 Corinthian chose not to release the figures in clear sachet format, another sign that this series was really aimed at the more advanced or mature collector, who valued the blister pack for long term collecting, over just the figure itself. The best seller from the range was Kevin Keegan, closely followed by Bobby Moore. The figures released in the lowest volume were Tom Finney, Nat Lofthouse, Stanley Matthews and Brian Robson.

 A very collectible set and hard to acquire these days, due largely to the incredibly low production volumes. The likes of Finney and Lofthouse are still found cheaply, due to their lack of popularity, however the rest are very hard to acquire in blister pack, especially the Bobby Moore figure, very seldom does he appear for sale and you could pay in excess of £15 for him.

 The figures were also released as Platinum packs and you could claim one free by simply collecting the tokens that came with the collectors information file. These Platinum packs are again very hard to come by, as there was very few ever produced and are highly collectible amongst collectors.

 Although not entirely embraced by all collectors, i still feel it was a worthwhile series and it gave us some truly great sculpts and some real collectors pieces.

Figure List