Written by Benjamin Christmann
In the deep gloom of the COVID-19 pandemic, there wasn’t much that thrived. Yet everyone remembers the niche items that boomed out of nowhere – lumber prices for self-starters, weight prices for home gyms, even GameStop stock. But sports cards? Why sports cards?
There are various factors that caused random skyrocketing for this market, but the most obvious is the fact that, “‘…[p]eople were home, cleaning out their attics, or messing around on eBay out of boredom,’” (Boston.com, 6). They simply stumbled on their collections. But it’s much deeper than just scrolling on reselling platforms and finding the lucky $100,000 card in your attic. That doesn’t just happen.
In sports cards, there are four sports that truly dominate the market – basketball, football, baseball, and soccer. F1, an international racing organization, has also become popular, but has yet to really entrench itself among collectors.
Collecting cards itself has been a hobby since the 19th century, and really picked up speed in the 1980s with basketball (think Michael Jordan). In the card world of today, there are generally two distinctions given to any item – modern or vintage. Vintage is often from before the aforementioned 1980s, where baseball stars like Honus Wagner and Mickey Mantle continue to command multi-million dollar sales for their rarity.
In the modern space, the hobby began to change the types of cards you can see. When opening a pack, most of it is just base cards – cards of miscellaneous players within a sport that have no significance in terms of monetary value. However, there are now three categories which are most valuable: rookies, meaning the first card that a player has as a professional; autographs, meaning a card with a physical signature from a player on it; and memorabilia cards, meaning a card with a piece of a jersey, bat, glove, hat, etc. With one of the more notable players in a sport, these categories of cards can fetch thousands of dollars. However when you combine two or more of these categories (for example, a rookie autograph), the card’s price can increase tenfold.
In the basketball world, the prices of these cards seem irrationally exuberant. A Kobe Bryant autographed rookie card, for example, sold on January 31, 2023 for $125,000. That’s six figures. So why are these prices so high, and what justifies the hefty price tag?
The largest platform for the sale of sports cards is eBay. On eBay, you can list an item on bid for a set period of time, or even set a buy-it-now price for more instantaneous purchases. As a seller, you can see the number of consumers who have viewed your item by clicking on it, as well as the people who are ‘watching’ your product. Watching entails adding to a watchlist so that sellers can see you’re interested, while bookmarking stuff you’re interested in.
With so many users present on eBay (over 100 million and growing), no matter what your market is, it seems to have a buyer (eDesk). From used clothes to car parts, each buyer seems to get matched to a seller – demand and supply meet. In sports cards, you can get a sale for a cheap, $1 card of a random baseball player from 1988. On the other hand, you could pay off a mortgage by selling the signature of the hottest new quarterback in football.
Card enthusiasts love sports cards because they are a way for them to intertwine their passions for their favorite players, teams, and sports through a store of value, meaning that once a consumer purchases a commodity, they will hypothetically be able to sell it for money in the future. But is it an investment, meaning can it grow in value? If history is any indication, then yes. The presence of eBay has revolutionized the industry, matching sellers and buyers to truly make bartering and pricing of certain items an economist’s dream.
Why are sports cards so expensive, though? Desirability and rarity are really the two keys. A player’s autograph can only be obtained through two avenues: a one-off chance of meeting the guy or girl, or buying a piece of memorabilia with their signature on it. The latter seems a lot more likely. Furthermore, cards can be serial numbered, meaning that they have a specific number out of, say, one hundred that corresponds to that card in particular. For example, a card may be number seventy-two out of one hundred, meaning that you have the seventy-second reprint of only one hundred cards in the entire world. The allure and importance of athletics help bring about the initial value, and then making rarer cards furthers higher prices for better, more popular players.
In comparison, though, many in the industry of finance have questioned the legitimacy of cryptocurrency for its lack of backing by viable currency and government, like the US dollar. Sports cards seem to be a niche representation of this. They are not backed as a form of currency, and have no intrinsic value.
What it boils down to is people’s willingness to pay for the asset. If sports cards were to suddenly become obsolete and lose all value overnight, no course of action could be taken. The only thing propping up the hobby is a constant influx of funds for packs every year and the intrigue of rarity. Demand shoots up when an item is the only one in the world, or even one out of a hundred. By appealing to this idea of exclusivity, consumers take pride in their collections and continue to allow the hobby to grow.
Bibliography
Finn, Chad. “Sports Card Collecting Is Booming, but It Looks a Lot Different than You Might Remember.” Boston.com, The Boston Globe, 29 Aug. 2021, https://www.boston.com/sports/mlb/2021/08/29/sports-card-collecting-boom-panini/.
“Sports Memorabilia, Fan Shop & Sports Cards For Sale.” EBay, https://www.ebay.com/b/Sports-Memorabilia-Fan-Shop-Sports-Cards/64482/bn_1857919.
Pereira, Daniel. “EBay Business Model.” Business Model Analyst, 27 Dec. 2022, https://businessmodelanalyst.com/ebay-business-model/.
“EBay Inc. (EBAY) Stock Price, News, Quote & History.” Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo!, 6 Feb. 2023, https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EBAY?p=EBAY&.tsrc=fin-srch. O’Sullivan, Ann. “EBay Statistics 2022.” EDesk, 21 Dec. 2022, https://www.edesk.com/blog/ebay-statistics/#:~:text=eBay%20statistics%202022-,eBay%20statistics%20overview,bigger%20audience%20for%20your%20products.