Why sports trading cards are the new hot investment

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Welcome to Yahoo Finance Sports Report, a unique look at the business of sports brought to you by Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports. I’m your host, Joe Pomliano, and I’m here to coach you through the financial game. Today we’ve got Yahoo Sports daily host Caroline Fen coming on the show to discuss the latest NFL news, and Ryan Hoke, president of PSA, the world’s largest collectibles authentication and grading service, joining us to discuss the latest news and collectibles. Let’s huddle up and get right into it.We’re kicking off this week with Pop’s Playbook. Why take a look at some of the biggest headlines in sports that you and your portfolio need to know. First up is the NWSL’s Gotham FC, making a landmark move this week to acquire US midfielder Jayden Shaw from the North Carolina Courage for a record breaking $1.25 million. At $1.25 million Shaw’s transfer fee is more than.Double the previous NWSL Intraleague transfer record of 600,000, which was set earlier this year. But at just 20 years old, Shaw brings Gotham FC International pedigree with 26 appearances for the US women’s national team and 8 gold. Gotham FC has already said that they plan to resign her through the 2029 season as they push for more postseason success.Next up is Dick’s Sporting Goods deal with Foot Locker. As Dick’s Sporting Goods looks to enhance its global offering, the sports retailer has officially closed its $2.4 billion acquisition of Foot Locker. With over 3200 stores across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Dick’s will immediately increase its international presence. Foot Locker will continue to operate as an independent brand under Dicks, preserving its lineup of stores like Kids Foot Locker and Champ Sports. But the acquisition could be aHuge win for shareholders as Dick expects the deal to enhance its earnings per share by 2026 and deliver over $100 million in cost savings. And last up for today’s playbook is unrivaled. The new women’s 3 on 3 basketball league, co-founded by Brianna Stewart and Nafisa Collier, has surged to a $340 million valuation after closing its Series B investment round this week. The investment round was led by Decimer Venture Partners with additional backing from several other notable investors.Including Serena Williams’ venture capital firm and Warner Brothers Discovery. Unrivaled already offers its players higher salaries in the WNBA in equity in the league too, so they will now use this new money on marketing, improved facilities, and additional roster spots for the league’s two recently announced expansion teams. And speaking of unrivaled, the league’s president, Alex Basil, recently joined Yahoo Finance’s asking for a trend to explain how the 3 on 3 women’s basketball League plans to build on its success from year one.

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You know, weExceeded expectations in season one. So what this does, it allows us to really expedite our timeline. You know, we have a lot of vision for how we can expand the league, add more players, you know, eventually get out on the market in the tour, which we’ll be doing this year for the first time out of our home base in Miami. So I think it just allows us to be a little bit more aggressive, um, and inevitably look for openings in the marketplace that may exist based on wherewe’re going.

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Now that we’ve covered aWide range of topics in the sports world. It’s time to talk football. Joining us now to discuss some of the biggest storylines from week one of the NFL season is Yahoo Sports daily host Caroline Fenton. Welcome to the show, Caroline. Thank you so much for joining us. Let’s start with my New York Giants. Uh, all the hope and optimism from the offseason was gone within a few minutes of week one against the Commanders. What was your thoughts on just sort of how the Giants played, but also the future for D and uh when Jackson Dar may become the starting quarterback?

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Yeah, don’t let that hope and optimism go away quite yet. There hasn’t been very much of it surrounding this Giants franchise, so hold on to it as much as you can because I think that hope and optimism should all be with that young rookie quarterback that you just mentioned, Jackson Dar. Now, I know a lot of New York Giants fans are growing impatient. They want to see him, they want to come in and be the starter after a game where Russell Wilson did not look.Very good by any sense of the word, but I think what Ryan Dael is doing is taking a very slow burn approach with Jackson Dar. There’s two philosophies in football. It’s sit or start the young quarterback. Sit the quarterback, let him learn, let him get up to speed at the speed of the game in the NFL or start him, baptism by fire. I subscribe, however, to the belief that sitting a young quarterback is nevera bad thing. Have him sit for too long rather than throw him out too early. The New York Giants have some inconsistencies on the offensive line, right? That was clear in their week one game. The left tackle, Andrew Thomas, will be out for the next couple of weeks. So if I’m Brian D, I’ll take the slow approach. I’ll let the offensive line get healthy. I’ll let the offensive line grow into one cohesive unit before throwing my young and inexperienced rookie quarterback out there.

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Yeah, if you’re Brian Da trying to keep your job, it certainly doesn’t help that Daniel Jones plays well in Indianapolis, but we’ll let the rest of the season play out. I won’t get too nervous or scared yet, but speaking of teams that looked bad, uh, the Miami Dolphins. What happened to the Miami Dolphins? I feel like they were one of the hottest teams in football over the last few years, and it feels like they have fallen off a cliff.

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It feels like we’ve gotten to the point in Miami, a point of no return. They went out there and it was, they looked dejected, they looked uninspired against the Indianapolis Colts, and I never want to question effort. I don’t think it’s fair. But in that game against the Indianapolis Colts, several times I questioned, do they even care? Are they even trying that hard? And that’s part of Miami’s culture. I believe that culture is a trickle down.From the front office and from the coaching staff down to the leadership and being in the locker room. The leadership in Miami has very fairly so been in question. You don’t have a performance like that in week one against the Indianapolis Colts team that had a whole heck of a lot of question marks and not question the leadership. There are some questions about Tuitakovaloa. Is he still a starting caliber quarterback in the National Football League? He turned the ball.Over 3 times against Indianapolis, 2 interceptions and one lost fumble. He’s now had 33 plus turnover games going back to September of 2024. That ties for the most in the National Football League. He has ball security questions, but not very effective against the Indianapolis Colts. Tyreek Hill was shown on the sidelines, very visibly upset and visibly frustrated with the performance on the field. So his future in Miami is in question, andSure those in Kansas City have already been picking up the phone to see what a potential trade could look like for Tyreek Hill since the Chiefs have some question marks at the wide receiver position. So I think the question marks in Miami all just kind of point toward a big reset, you know, replacing general manager Chris Greer, replacing head coach Mike McDaniel, a guy who was one of the hottest young coaches on the market just a couple of years ago, but after severalI just falling short expectation or falling short performances and falling short of expectations in Miami, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike McDaniel was the first head coach to potentially lose his job in the middle of the season.

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Yeah, and I don’t think you’re totally wrong about Tyree Hill possibly going back to the Chiefs. We’ll have to wait and see on that one. Lastly, quickly, I just want to get your opinion on YouTube’s first exclusive NFL game uh last week in Brazil.

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I think that YouTube is still searching for its identity. As far as the production quality, the graphics, the score bug, the the production itself. I know there are some concerns and some questions about streaming and its ability to hold on to the bandwidth of millions and millions of stream of streams and streamers. I thought that was all good. It was all a good quality broadcast. But I felt like the pre-game show was searching for an identity, that they were trying to simultaneously cater to a young Gen Z audience, andAlso to an older millennial audience, but in the process, they missed the mark on both. I love the addition of Kay Adams and having the voices from former players like Derek Carr and Tyrann Matthew and Cam Newton. I think all great things. They got the big names in there. I think they’re just searching for a way to kind of have everything mesh and figure out who they want to be. When viewers turn on a YouTube NFL broadcast, what can they expect? For right now, for lack of a better term, feels a little bit cringy.

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Yeah, I agree, and I was also surprised with the viewership number. I mean, 1.1 million international viewers feels relatively small considering how many games they’re playing internationally, but also the whole premise behind YouTube was the global reach. So we’ll see if that changes over time, if they get more games going into the future, but thank you so much for coming on today, Caroline.

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Thanks so much for having me.

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Now we have to take a quick break, but coming up we’ve got PSA’s Ryan Ho joining the show to discuss how sports collectibles has quickly become an institutional asset class.Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Sports Report. I’m your host, Joe Pompeano. We’ve made it to the one on one, a conversation where I get to break down news and sports with the key player in the industry. This week we’re speaking with Ryan Hogue, president of PSA, the leading collectible’s authentication and grading service. Welcome to the show, Ryan. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’d love to start with an event that took place, uh, this summer, the National, one of the largest card collecting shows in the world. I know you were there. Was there anything that stuck out to you or any trends that you picked up while you were there?

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Yeah, good to see you again, Joe, thanks for having me on. Um, yeah, the national was in Rosemont, Illinois this year, it was the end of July 1st part of August, uh, record breaking attendance, I think compared to previous years, a lot of energy and excitement. I think one of the things that stood out to me was, was the plethora of younger collectors, uh, that are coming into the hobby, saw lots of kids with parents walking around, lots of trading happening on the show floor and it trade nights kind of after hours, um, so it feels like the hobby in the industry in general is in a really healthy place.Yeah,

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I would love toalso just talk about some recent news that came up over the last few weeks, which was the $13 million Michael Jordan, uh, Kobe Bryant card. Now this card to me it felt like came out of nowhere. I didn’t really know anything about this card and all of a sudden it sets this massive record so far and away above everything that we had ever seen. What is the deal with thiscard?

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Yeah, you know, this car actually came into our offices a few months back. Um, I had never seen it before, but when we got notified, hey, this was gonna be coming in for grading, it was pretty exciting just seeing this one.Um, you know, it’s an onc card autograph of Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan with a game used logo man from their from their actual uniforms, um, only card of its kind in existence, and I had no idea what it was gonna sell for. I knew it was gonna go for seven figures, but yeah, when I saw that that record almost $13 million final sale price at uh Heritage auctions, I was blown away by it.And I think that that that just further validates the the sports collectibles and trading card industry uh is is is a valued kind of investment vehicle for for some folks that maybe traditionally would be in fine art. You’re seeing that move into things like sports cards.

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Whatwas it like when you were actually able to see that card?

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Oh, I mean it was amazing. I mean, we, we see cool stuff every day come through our offices, but, but that’s like one of the highlight cards, you know, we’re gonna see this year when that came through and and just knowing that that card was in both Jordan and Kobe’s hands being signed, that you could touch those logo mans and that was in a game used jersey, um, it was pretty special, and so that that.Definitely stood out forus.

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Yeah, I mean, it was pretty shocking for a lot of people too, probably because you see Kevin O’Leary talking about royalties, and I think everyone seems that he wants to, uh, get good deals. So, uh, to pay that much for a card was certainly shocking. One of the other things he mentioned that I’d love to just get your opinion on is, uh, I think he’s mentioned this a couple of times now. I don’t know how much progress he’s made on it, but is this like index for sports.Cards, like basically creating this, uh, taking all the sports cards that him and his partners own, putting it together and allow that allowing that to trade, whether that be in the public markets or some other vehicle they use. What is your just opinion on kind of that thought process of like actually taking an asset that is historically seen as sort of a hobby and now really giving it uh institutional value and allowing people to uh to trade on it and potentially profit?

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Yeah, you know, it’s not a crazy idea. It feels like a natural evolution of of where the industry has been has been going. You have ETFs of other types of asset classes, whether it’s, uh, you know, crypto or it could be other alternatives, it could be commodity asset classes, and so, um, the industry is kind of dabbled with this a bit.Over the last 56 years. Part of what what started back in maybe 2020, 21, that didn’t really have legs, was like fractional ownership of individual collectible items, that that posed some problems where, you know, who had the controlling interest in in, you know, that individual collectible and could it be liquidated or not.I think if you took a basket approach where basically you’re deploying funds across a category, like, hey, we’re gonna buy, um, you know, modern basketball cards or we’re gonna invest inUh, Pokemon cards or whatever it happens to be, people wanting to get exposure to that asset class, I think that this, this makes a lot of sense as a pretty smart vehicle to be able to have out there to to give people accessto.

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I know PSA has uh gotten into comic book grading. Tell me more about that market. Like that seems like another market that uh is sort of a natural evolution for collectible sports memorability, etc. but like how big is that market today? Why were you guys excited to start grading those uh those comic books too?

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Yeah, yeah, we entered a comic book grading this summer, uh, July, we, we went live with that. We’re also doing magazine grading as well, so we kind of view those, you know, um, just the other side of the coin, basically. It felt like a pretty significant gap in our portfolio over the last, you know, couple of decades, why, why isn’t PSA in the comic space? Um, I don’t have a good reason for why we never entered it, but we decided a couple of years ago we wanted to make a push into this space, natural overlap with some of the other categories.We’re in, we do we do vintage video game grading, we obviously have uh a fledgling like doing very well, like pop culture TCG division where Pokemon cards or, you know, someone’s half of the volume that we grade from a card perspective, a lot of overlap with the comic audience. And so we were excited to launch this, we we think we have some differentiated capabilities with our uh our holder, uh, from an aesthetics, from a preservation and security standpoint that we think is pretty.Innovative. This October we’re gonna be rolling out support for autographed comics and magazines, uh, leveraging the PSA DNA brands. So if you have, say, an autograph Sports Illustrated back to Michael Jordan, you know, we’ll be able to authenticate and grade the autograph in addition to the magazine. And so we’re off to a great start. We’re really excited, we were taking in submissions at the National and we were also at San Diego Comic-Con. Uh, we’ll be at New York Comic-Con, uh, coming up in October, so we’re excited to see, see how this grows for us.

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Do you think that’ll be one of the bigger businesses over time or still like a relatively niche part of the business? I mean,

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it’ll be niche relative to cards. Cards just worth everything for how large it is, but we’re, we’re excited about the growth potential. We think it could, it could grow to be probably the #2 category at PSA.

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Yeah, and when you think about uh grading specifically, how much of that is being done, if any, by technology versus humans today?

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Yeah, we’re we’re leveraging technology in a lot of ways. I think the way that we view it is it it’s almost like technology assisted human grading.So tech is really great at some things. We image every item whether it’s a card, a comic, a video game, we image it before we grade it and after we grade it. And so in a card example, you know, technology is really great at measuring centering, that’s math, that’s precise, and we have ranges for, you know, where a card can fall on our 10 point grading scale based on the ratios of the borders. So we can use tech to assist there. We’ve trained tech to assist us with counterfeit detection. It works really well there, but there’s other things like I appeal that you really want to have that human.That’s seen tens of tens of thousands or millions of cards over their, their tenure. We have some graders that have been with us 20-30 years at the company and so they’ve seen, they’ve seen it all, and so they know really what stands out uh to separate maybe one card from another and so you don’t want to miss that kind of human element here and so we’re trying to marry marry the two, but we’re definitely investing a ton in technology. It’s helping us scale to to to grade, you know, we’re we’re out putting 80,000 cards a day across our various grading locations and that wouldn’t be possible if we weren’t leveraging it.

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80,000 cards a day is amazing. That’s uh pretty big.

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It’s gotten big.

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Yeah, uh, one of the things we’ve seen over the years, a trend emerging is sort of people, uh, using collectibles and memorabilia, uh, as a financial asset, trading these things rather than stocks or crypto or anything else like that. What are you seeing there that gives an indication one way or the other as to whether this is going to be a legitimate asset class where people can actually make money in the long run?

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Yeah, I mean, hard for me to comment totally on that. I mean, I, I can pay attention to trends and where secondary prices are, and so if you look at the card ladder price indexes across different categories, a lot of them are up this year. Uh, I know the Pokemon index is up north of 60%, some sports in indexes are up north of 20%.So I mean that’s really strong performance relative to other other markets if you’re looking, say benchmarking against the S&P 500, um, but, but hard for me to comment, you know, on, on like, you know, trade trade-offs between going in, you know, investment in cards versus versus equities, uh, not really my place.

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Yeah, understandable. If I thought about this from just like a miss uh risk management perspective though, right? Obviously there’s there’s risk management when it comes to your portfolio about their assets. Uh, if I had a trading card collection, what are some things that I should be worried about when it comes to protecting the value of those assets?

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Yeah, so I think, I think if you are looking at it from a longer term appreciation, I think getting your collection in a state of likeMost desirable, most rare items, those are gonna always have a premium. There’s, there’s a saying that, you know, any Honus Wagner, that’s been sold has never sold for less than it’s sold for previously. So that’s one of the really rare, you know, tobacco cards. There’s about 60 that have been graded, you know, across the industry. So everyone that’s bought one of those has made money when they’ve sold it, and so.It, it, it’s because it’s a desirable card. There aren’t very many of them, and I think that Kobe Jordan, uh, logo man exquisite card that that just sold is an example of that. It’s a one of 12 very desirable athletes, uh, really unique piece where if you’re wanting to have that investment grade, I would, I would gravitate to the nicest, rarest, most desirable cards, you know, possible, and somebody like Michael Jordan I think is gonna be desirable, you know, for, for many decades to come.

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Yeah, he can do no wrong. Uh, it feels like the collectibles market has always been a little bit US centric, but, uh, over the last few months and even the last couple of years, it certainly seems to be growing a lot more internationally too. What are you seeing outside of the United States when it comes to collectibles?

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Yeah, I know internationally collectibles are booming. Uh, PSA expanded to Japan in the summer of 2023. We actually moved into an expanded facility in March of this year.Uh, we’re gonna be moving into Europe and having a grading facility in Frankfurt, Germany that’s gonna be open in 2026. So we’re trying to reach collectors closer to where they are to offer better service, you know, faster processing, less hassles of navigating, you know, customs and and going cross-border, um.When when we look outside of the US it’s it’s amazing how much uh TCG trading card games, namely Pokemon, dominates what we see. lot of passionate collectors across whether it’s Asia or Europe, Australia, um, but we also see a really heavy uh interest in soccer and basketball. So those, those are the two sports that carry the most weight when you look outside of the US, but really passionate community, you’ve got companies like Fanatics establishing.Um, they’re kind of marquee, uh, retail showcase in central London that we also have a submission center inside of and I think that that’s a good example of kind of going, going to these other countries and and really showcasing what card collecting and kind of the hobby hobby can be.

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Yeah, my best growth indicators, every time I talk to you, it seems like you guys are busier and busier, which is a good indication that the market is growing, but thanks so much for joining us today, Ryan. Yeah, thanks, Joe.The clock is winding down here, but we have just enough time for some final buzz. So let’s talk about how it will cost NFL fans nearly $1000 to watch every game this season. Now it’s no secret that the NFL works with a variety of media partners. This is a key reason why they’re the world’s most profitable sports league, but at what point does too much become too much? Fans can still get most of the NFL’s action with an antenna, as CBS, Fox, and.NBC will broadcast 218 of the league’s 272 regular season games this year. But here’s the catch. The NFL knows streaming platforms will play a massive role in its next media rights negotiation, which could come as early as 2030 via an opt out. That’s why the NFL has continued to slice and dice its schedule, spreading games across multiple partners, which ultimately makes it more complicated and more expensive for fans.Let me give you an example. If you want to watch all of the NFL’s out of market games, you’ll need Sunday Ticket on YouTube for nearly $400 per year, and Amazon Prime Video is still paying the NFL $1 billion per year for the exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football, but it doesn’t stop there. A basic cable package is needed because some of the Monday Night Football games will air exclusively on ESPN. 6 of the league’s 7 international games will air on NFL Network.You’ll also need Netflix for two Christmas Day games, and NFL fans will even need Peacock, as they’ll exclusively stream a matchup in week 17. Now you can game the system a little bit by getting discounted prices or canceling subscriptions during the offseason, but if you are like the 50% of Americans who have already cut the cord with traditional broadcast TV, it’ll cost you nearly $1000 to watch every NFL game this season, not including taxes and fees.We’re all out of time, so it’s officially game over for this week. Thank you so much to Caroline, Ryan, and for all of you for joining us. Please make sure to scan the QR code below to follow Yahoo Finance podcast for more videos and expert insight and catch us every Friday wherever you get your podcast. I’m your host, Joe Pomlianaa. See you next time.

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This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.