Sports Cards Are Back In 2021 & Bigger Than Ever
Did you love picking up a pack of cards with your favorite sports heroes on them when you were a kid? Maybe they were sold at the local drug store, next to the candy aisle or up by the cash register. The smell of wax and bubble gum permeated your nostrils before you even got a peek at who is on top of that first opened wrapper. Every time, that quick hit of adrenaline would rush through your system as you chased your favorite player. If not found in this 35 cent pack, then maybe he’s hiding out in one of the others. There was only one way to find out.
Perhaps you had a local card shop where all the kids hung out at 10 AM on Saturday mornings instead of watching cartoons, slinging deals with your buddies as you attempted to get one over on them via a huge trade you were making. You raced home on your bike after the deal had been made and couldn’t wait to tell the guys on the other end of your landline phone what you had scored.
It’s human nature to crave nostalgia. For many of us, those fond memories of sports cards (simply “baseball cards” to a child of the 80’s and 90’s) bring us back to simpler times and pleasures. As you got older and became interested in developing relationships that could lead to a date to the movies or school dances, sports cards took a back seat in your life. Those boxes full of long lost rookies that never panned out began collecting dust in your bedroom closest, out of sight but never forgotten.
Sports cards are once again a valuable niche hobby, with adults coming back into it after being out of it 25 years or more. Collecting cards can be done cheaply for just a few dollars or you can purchase a box for $1000, even $10,000, to open yourself while not able to go anywhere because of a global pandemic. Even if you don’t have the money to buy a single pack, you could watch others doing so on YouTube or apps like Loupe where 24/7, someone around the world is likely cracking a fresh pack LIVE. How cool is that?
According to Card Ladder, sports cards have quickly become an almost $6B business in 2021. Remember looking for three or four different companies producing your favorite rookie player? These days, you could chase every rookie card made of your favorite player and still never finish the accomplishment before retiring. Why? Manufactured Scarcity. There may be only one card produced that is a certain color and all collectors of that player are after it while only one of you can own the card. There could be only five that are red, or fifty that are gold. That one card you need, unless a person decides to move it on a platform that facilitates the sale of sports cards, can only otherwise be found hiding out in a pack.
If you want to a buy a “single” of a sports card, there are countless options beyond eBay, although they still remain king. Stop me if this sounds confusing. There is StarStock, MySlabs, InvestaCard, CheckOutMyCards and others all vying for your business to help facilitate a card transaction, for a small fee. Then there is every single popular social media platform where someone is trying to raise a little money right now via a sale by showing some of their best cards off in a light box to produce a sale.
Let’s circle back to those cards you left behind at your parents. Unless your grandfather handed you down his collection, 99% of it will be junk. They don’t call it the “junk wax era” for nothing. Sports cards in the 1980’s and 90’s were notoriously overproduced, and everyone thought they had a pile of money they were sitting on in the future to easily cash out. For the most part, they were wrong. Kevin Maas never panned out, but let’s go back to some of those other cards and have a look. I didn’t know who Derek Jeter was back in 1993 and this one has a gold foil label on it from Topps. Nice, I’ll keep that one to the side. Or you were a tween in the year 2000 and decided to buy some football cards one weekend. Tom Brady? A guy drafted so late, nobody knew who he was so you threw him into a commons pile. Ok, you have my attention.
Every generation has its heroes. The Greatest Generation had Jackie Robinson and Mickey Mantle. Boomers were blessed with Hank Aaron and Wilt Chamberlain. Generation X will never see a guy like Ken Griffey Jr. and his sweet swing again, or the Greatest of All Time NBA player, Michael Jordan. Every kid dreams that their favorite stars of today, like Lebron James and Patrick Mahomes, supplant the G.O.A.T’s of yesteryear. Brady did it to Joe Montana, there is always hope. Can Zion Williamson have a better career than Jordan or even Lebron? Call us in 2045.
Just like your Grandpa wanted a Hank Aaron rookie card from a pack that costs a nickel, today’s young collectors are after a Luka Doncic autographed card from a pack that can cost as little as $5 or $10. But you better act fast! As the title indicates, sports cards are back and bigger than ever. That Doncic autograph (which would have been available in 2018), may have only cost $5 in a pack, it is a lot harder to find autographed than a typical rookie card. The odds, like a lottery scratch-off, are required to be listed on the product. “Autographs are in 1:27 packs.”. Great, you think to yourself, until you realize there are 99 other guys who also have an autographed rookie card in the set. You were fortunate to find ten, $5 packs at your local Walmart, take them home to open them all up. In them, you beat the odds and land an autographed card, from some guy who never played a day in the NBA. Bummer.
This is not meant to be a cautionary tale of any kind but to go back to why sports cards are such big business. Today’s collectors don’t need to go and buy every pack within a 100 mile radius, which is getting harder and harder to do anyway with so many people into the sports card hobby, some even buying out stores just to resell sealed products for a profit elsewhere called “ retail flipping”. Let’s travel back to 2018 and you decide you want a Luka Doncic autographed card. While a bit steep, eBay has the one you’ve always wanted listed for sale at $1200. Doing the math, you could end up spending $10k on packs before you ever opened one, and even that isn’t a guarantee. He’s now your favorite player and you believe he has star potential for the next decade plus, so you plunk down what could amount to a month’s rent for a Luka Doncic autograph.
Fast forward to 2021, you’ve owned the Luka autograph for several years now and not only is he your favorite player, but now a superstar in the NBA. For whatever reason, you didn’t keep up on the prices of the card but remember you purchased it for a month’s rent. Holy crap! Are my eyes deceiving me? That same card is now for sale on eBay for $20,000!? It can’t be. Oh yes, it can.
Even players you’ve never heard of from 1955 can be had for a $1 or $2. We have established that most cards from the 80’s and 90’s do better getting the Midwest through a Polar Vortex in February as fire kindling. And that autograph you pulled out of a pack of the guy who never made it will end up in the $1 bin at some mall card show next week. But it’s hope that keeps collecting alive. To know your opinion is validated about a player being excellent over time is a powerful thing. For every JaMarcus Russell, a guy like Tom Brady comes out of nowhere and has the best career in the history of the sport.
In actuality, about 99.999% of all sports cards ever made are essentially worthless, unless you find a hardcore collector who likes to put together sets. On the other end of that spectrum, some of the most rare cards have been selling for seven figures beginning in 2020. No, that Derek Jeter Topps Gold you found last summer isn’t going to allow you to retire, but if you took good enough care of it, could bring you $5–8k if you’re lucky and it “grades” well. Grading is a whole new arena to understanding sports cards today that this article won’t even consider touching. Talk to someone you trust that doesn’t just see dollar signs in potential good cards you own, realize what the next steps are you need to take to maximize potential returns and don’t act on anything without doing a ton of research. Hopefully your mom, in a hasty spring cleaning campaign, didn’t throw your old cards out. You never know what you may have, even if it does mostly look like junk era garbage, all it takes is one.
Grown men are now fighting over sealed boxes at your local Target to get those latest potential rookie autographs worth thousands. That local card shop around the corner? Check Yelp, there may be one that recently opened up nearby in the last few years. Your neighbor could have set up a recording studio in his basement to show off his latest purchases or opens packs live that people paid good money for him to do. There are local, regional and national card shows, many have been going strong for decades, even if you weren’t aware.
Get to collecting, the sports card market is booming in 2021, with no end in sight for further growth. It’s fun, exhilarating and potentially very profitable. Best of luck to all of those people collecting Justin Herbert, Connor McDavid, Ja Morant & Fernando Tatis Jr. Call us in 2045.
