People browse items at the Sport Card and Memorabilia Expo, in Mississauga, Ont., on Nov. 13, 2022.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
The sports trading-card market is booming.
Unlike similar traditional activities such as stamp or coin collecting, the sports-card industry has successfully brought back fans who rediscovered the hobby from their childhoods, while attracting a new generation. The global sports-card trading market was valued at US$635-million in 2022, and it is expected to surpass US$767-million by 2028.
The recent renaissance was decades in the making. Once a popular pastime for sports fans in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s, the market began a multidecade decline beginning with the 1994-95 season, which saw a Major League Baseball strike in tandem with an NHL lockout.
“People got jaded when it came to sports, so why would they go off and buy trading cards when they’re upset with baseball players and their league, or hockey players and their league?” asks Jason Masherah, president of Upper Deck, exclusive trading-card partner of the NHL and its players’ association. “On top of that, you had overproduction, and that created market saturation.”
Mr. Masherah says the hobby’s gradual recovery was hobbled by the financial crisis in 2008, but it began to bounce back again in 2015, and it reached new heights during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among those who began collecting prior to the 1994 decline. “Those of us who grew up in that generation started digging through their attics, their parents’ garages, their basements – remembering how cool it was to collect cards, and realizing it was something we could do with our kids.”
According to eBay, the world’s largest card resale site, there were four-million-more card transactions on the platform in 2020, compared with a year earlier, with transactions surpassing $2-billion in the first half of 2021 alone, matching all sales from the year prior. In 2020, a card was sold on the site every two seconds.
It’s not just collectors of a certain age that are flocking back to the old-fashioned trading card. Mr. Masherah says the hobby is also seeing significant interest from a younger generation of collectors who, data show, are both interested in sports and highly entrepreneurial.
“If you go to a card show you’ll see an 18-, 19-year-old kid that’s created his or her own business where they’re carrying around a case of cards and a bunch of money, and they’re transacting and wheeling and dealing,” he says.
That observation also rings true for Steve Menzie, owner of the Sports Cards and Memorabilia Expo, which twice a year hosts the hobby’s second biggest gathering in North America, and largest in Canada. In April, the show hosted 20,000 hobbyists at the International Centre in Mississauga, while its most recent event in November saw more than 25,000 visitors – doubling attendance records set before Mr. Menzie took over the show in 2015.
“I would say that the number of kids has easily tripled since COVID-19,” he says. “The average age is lower, the male-female mix is much better, as is the racial diversity of the audience.”
Mr. Menzie adds that the kinds of items traded at his shows have also diversified to include sports beyond hockey, and even non-sports collectibles.
“It is still far and away the biggest hockey-card collecting show in the world, but it’s grown,” he says. “Hockey hasn’t diminished, but other categories have grown in the same way that the market has grown in Toronto for baseball, soccer and basketball, and most are now fans of multiple sports.”
Collectors come to such events to fill gaps in their collections, get memorabilia signed by the sports stars in attendance and even earn a few bucks. For most regulars, the hobby is really about the community.
“From the older generation, the guys that do the vintage, all the way down to the kids running around trying to do trade-up challenges – taking a $1 card and trying to see what they end up with at the end of the day by doing trades with vendors – it’s all about camaraderie,” says David Austerweil, owner and operator of Hogtown Cards.
A long-time hobbyist and member of that tight-knit community, Mr. Austerweil quit his job as a chef in 2017, and after some soul searching during the pandemic, he sold one of his vehicles to open his card shop in Toronto earlier this year.
He says there are many elements that give a card value, but the primary factors include the popularity of the player, the rarity of the card and its overall condition. While digital sports collectibles – such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and NBA Top Shot moments – experienced a surge in popularity during the pandemic, Mr. Austerweil says the communities rarely overlap.
Card manufacturers such as Upper Deck, as well as competitors such as Topps, Panini and Fanatics, offer their own digital collectibles, but they use the technology to offer unique ways to bridge the real and the virtual.
“We have a platform called e-Pack, which is unique in the fact that you open up packs of cards virtually, but the cards are physical cards that you can have delivered to your house,” says Mr. Masherah of Upper Deck. “That allows you to open up a physical pack of trading cards 24/7, and you can leave the cards in our vault, and trade them with other users.”
Such efforts are intended to help expand the hobby to a new generation of collectors without alienating those who have recently returned to a childhood passion.
“That’s the key, making sure we continue to engage those collectors that came in during the last 10 years of growth, and continue to keep them excited about collecting,” Mr. Masherah says. “At the end of the day people collect because it’s a form of entertainment and enjoyment, and it’s incumbent on everyone to continue to focus on that.”