Is The Sports Card Market Headed for a Crash?
· Yahoo Sports
There’s been a ton of social media posts, Reddit threads, and straight-up think pieces asking whether or not the sports card market is heading for a major crash—is it time to panic?
Lucky for you, your buddy J.R. Fickle is here to investigate. I dug deep into the depths of the data to determine whether or not we’re headed for a huge crash, or if this is just a simple market correction.
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In this two-part series, I’ll lay out all of the evidence—the knowns and unknowns.
Part 1: Is supply outpacing demand?
Yes. It is. There’s too much. Way more than we need. Stop making so much.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this deep-dive investigation.
Don’t look now, but the Caitlin Clark market is starting to slip into the red. There are a lot of people who are starting to wonder if she’s too spicy for their taste.
Even some of her biggest fans are starting to sour—ever so slightly. It’s been a minute since we’ve seen Caitlin Clark criticized by her fanbase, and I’m pretty sure this is more blip than trend, but you have other young players like Paige Bueckers and rookie Olivia Miles who are making people start to have wandering eyes.
Let’s talk about Olivia Miles for a second. (That, friends, is a segue.) As a rookie, she’s being mentioned in contention for the MVP award after basically taking a Lynx team that is without their best player and putting them on her back and just doing insanely impressive things.
It will be absolutely interesting to see what kind of FOMO-craze run her cards go on when they finally hit the market. As of now, you can find her “Rated Prospect” NIL cards, some Panini Instant cards and, of course, Leaf autos.
I can only imagine what her market does when Optic/Donruss and Prizm are released.
And now, Part 2 of my deep-dive investigation into whether or not the sports card market is headed for a crash.
Part 2: Should I panic sell?
Nah.
I got caught up in a rabbit hole while looking at vintage newspapers, since I still think there’s something there when it comes to collecting—under the premise that nostalgia will continue to rule the day, and in these times of media uncertainty and digital replacing physical, people are going to long for the “good old days” of the Grey Lady. And while I was in that hole, I got into looking at old mobster newspaper headlines.
They’re hilarious.
Like this one from 1934 showing (literally) a dead “Baby Face” Nelson with the headline “Uncle Sam Got Him, After All.”
While hilarious, it took me a minute to realize that the dude was selling prints of old newspapers. Which you probably shouldn’t buy.
Instead, buy a microfiche machine. Then you can buy a whole year’s worth of Consumer Reports magazine from 1975 on microfilm.
You can get full years of old editions of the New York Times on microfilm as well. From the 1940s?! Imagine how many gangster headlines are in there!
Hey, what if microfiche has a run? What if people long for it? What if you’re the first ever microfiche/microfilm influencer? Anything is possible.
Speaking of “anything is possible”... It seems crazy to say it, but it feels like we have a new “Greatest Knick of All Time” after Jalen Brunson masterfully led the Knicks to a championship. It will certainly be interesting to see how much his market booms and if that boom holds at all.
His cards were up massively this past week in anticipation of the Knicks winning the championship (and up over 44% in the last 30 days according to ALT) but we’ll see if the trend continues up at this pace now that he’s the Finals MVP.
Shout out to Topps for crushing it with this 2026 Knicks Champions Topps Now set. I know the chasers will be impossible to hit, but they are very cool - the Brunson and Walt Frazier 1/1 is awesome.
Congrats to the Knicks, their fans, and the legendary Frank who I know was up in heaven listening to the game on WFAN.