Author: Tristan Stehle

Would you believe that you could buy something for $400 and then in just a few months sell it for $10,000? You would probably laugh, but sports cards made that happen. Sports cards have been collected for over a century and began to pick up steam in the late 80s and early 90s chasing Ken Griffey Jr. However, by the early 2000s, the market had declined, suffering from overproduction and lack of interest. It remained like this for years and years, but this all changed in 2020. The sports card market exploded because of Covid-19, The Rise of Online Marketplaces, Social Media and National Attention. This led to card prices skyrocketing thousands of percent in just a matter of months.

When the Coronavirus pandemic hit, lockdowns left us locked in our homes. SportingNews, Ryan Fagan says, “They [people] looked for ways to pass the time without physically interacting with the outside world. There’s only so much Netflix a person can watch” People found themselves with more free time than ever. This extra time led many to rediscover old hobbies or pick up new ones, and for a significant number of people, that hobby was sports cards, “the [sports card] fire ignited once again” (Fagan) and the card market hasn’t looked back since. The 2020 Covid Recession was not a problem for the sports card industry, “card sales have demolished all-time records, dumbfounding investors and collectors alike” ESPN’s Dan Hajducky says. The Covid Pandemic revived cards, but social media took it to the moon. 

Social Media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok saw an explosion of content related to sports cards resulting in 100s of millions of views. People had nothing to do, Dan Miller of LA Times said “People weren’t working, they weren’t leaving the house, there was no sports, there was no DraftKings, people [would] stream it [cards] on their TV”. People were buying into card breaks for $50 and getting $1000 cards in return over and over. They were submitting these cards to get authenticated and graded for cheap and reselling in higher grade for massive profits and with more people looking to sell cards, this led to the rise of online marketplaces like eBay, Goldin Auctions, PWCC and specialized sports card platforms like Whatnot. These platforms made it easier than ever to buy and sell cards.  

The ease of online transactions and the ability to reach a broader audience drove both demand and prices to new heights. “From May to early June, more than 40 cards sold on eBay for at least $50,000. From mid-May to July, that number rose to 96, with more than 35% going for $90,000 or more” (Hajducky). Record sales were flying all over the place on these platforms. As more people joined the industry, record breaking sales of cards began to make national headlines like the Luka Doncic Rookie Logoman selling for a record $4.6 million, fueling interest from an entirely new audience that has yet to join the party, investors. Investors were seeing the growth of this market and were hopping on, they saw that it “has grown at roughly 2.5 times the rate of the S&P 500 since 2008” (Wellbeloved). Ever since they onboarded cards to their assets from August to September, six of the most expensive cards ever sold were in those months making this industry become one of the fastest growing industries in the world.

So what did cards really do? During late 2019, Lebron James Rookie Card in a perfect Gem Mint 10 condition was $1,100 fast forward to early 2021 it reached $42,000. Not only did it happen to expensive cards, it also happened to low end cards such as a Luka Doncic Rookie Card in a Gem Mint 10, buying it for $50 in early 2020 and selling it for $2,000 such as I did back in 2021. It happened to football cards also where a Patrick Mahomes Rookie Card in a PSA 10 selling for $14,000 off a $200 investment in 2020, and baseball cards, hockey cards and even Pokemon cards. All sales provided by Card Ladder. Sports cards blew up in a way no one could have imagined.

I wouldn’t be writing this if I had not experienced this boom. I’ve always been a collector all my life but in 2019 I decided to get serious about it and started trying to make some money off of it. I was buying cards on eBay, getting them graded to try and add more value to the card and selling them in 2020 for a lot of money. It really opened my eyes to see the potential when I bought a Zion Williamson rookie card for $20, got it graded and sold it for $1000. My biggest sale I had was for $10,000 for a Collin Sexton card. I had paid $400 for it. I had built a collection worth more than 6 figures at the time. Then as fast as the market went up, it went down just as fast. 

Fast forward 3 years and the sports card market went from boom to bust, cards have now dropped approximately 90% since their peak. The $42,000 Lebron James card I talked about above is now worth $4,000. The Luka Doncic card is now worth $250 and the Mahomes rookie card is worth just over $4,000. In 5+ short years the sports card market went from making people rich to now a lot of them losing money on their investments. What once was a raging market in 2020 and 2021 has cooled to pre covid levels in 2025. Will we ever see a bubble this big again?