The Cardboard Crash
As the National Football League has just six weeks left, excitement is at an all time high for few teams and their fans, and other teams and fan bases are looking forward to the NFL Draft on April 25th. In recent years this is when the Football card market spikes drastically. However, this year the market looks a little different.
Players on the teams who have good super bowl chances usually see an upward tick in their card values, but this year we have not seen the same results. For example, one of the most liquid cards in the hobby is the Prizm Silver, a card that features a glossy finish. The 2017 Patrick Mahomes Prizm Silver PSA 10 is doing right around $3,000 right now. At this time last year this card was around $4,000.
Mahomes added another Super Bowl ring to his collection last year, so one would expect this card to be over $4000, but it is not. Top Quarterbacks like Jalen Hurts, Josh Allen, Trevor Lawrence, and others are also either down or have stalled. So what is going on with the sports card market? I go to the local Sioux Falls Card to ask vendors their thoughts.
Jon Eck who runs the show, and has been in the sports card industry for nearly four decades says, “The whole economy sucks, and people just do not have money to invest right now. If you are a collector this is the time to buy. I have found many cards for my collection that a year ago I could not have imagined paying the low prices for them that I have.”
Dennis Worden, owner of Triple Play Sports Cards, thinks some of it has to do with the poor play from the rookie and second-year quarterbacks. Bryce Young has looked terrible, Desmond Ridder got benched,and Sam Howell’s team is terrible. Investors have poured money into these guys’s cards over the summer and past few months, and they are still recovering from their losses.
Mark Johnson, who has been the vendor next to my table for as long as I can remember, had some very interesting information about the market, “I tell every one of my friends to buy the cards that are going to hold their value over the next couple of years. Think about it. Is Joe Montana going to get injured next season? No, he hasn’t played in decades. Invest in the legends, and you will see a steady rise of their card values, but it will always be in the upwards direction. Compared to the modern day stuff where it could go to zero.”
Overall the sports card market has been down over the past couple of months, but hopefully the economy will bounce back, and we will see more investors and collectors pouring their hard earned money into the hobby.