We Used To Buy These With Pocket Change (What Happened?)

TL;DR

Sports cards shifted from a cheap kids' hobby to an unaffordable investor market driven by price guides, mass production, and monopolistic consolidation under Fanatics.

Key Points

• 1.Sports cards originated as tobacco inserts marketed to both adults and children in the late 1800s. Competing tobacco companies used cards to drive sales, but a 1897 Treasury ban on tobacco inserts — citing gambling promotions and indecent imagery — ended that era and opened the door for candy companies.
• 2.Candy and gum companies established the modern card format between 1914 and the 1950s. Cracker Jack introduced mail-order full sets in 1915, and Big League Chew's 1933 bubble gum cards established the still-used template: larger format, vivid colors, and player biographies on the back.
• 3.Topps ran a 25-year monopoly that kept cards primarily a kids' product, until a 1980 court ruling broke it open. New competitors flooded the market with low-quality, error-filled cards that paradoxically excited investor-type collectors hunting rare misprints and variations.
• 4.James Beckett's 1979 standardized price guide and his 1984 monthly magazine transformed collecting into investing. By 1990, a market study found 77% of collectors were buying cards at least partly as investments, and major newspapers called cards 'inflation hedges' and compared them favorably to gold and stocks.
• 5.The 1994 MLB players' strike triggered a catastrophic market collapse. Card shops that had peaked at roughly 10,000 locations in the US shrank to fewer than 200 by the mid-2000s as investor-driven demand evaporated.
• 6.The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a massive revival, but primarily benefited high-end breakers and investors. The Last Dance on Netflix caused Jordan card sales to jump 400%, eBay reported a 142% surge in sports card sales in 2021, and a single card sold for nearly $13 million in 2022, while average collectors remained priced out.
• 7.Fanatics now holds the biggest monopoly in sports card history, owning Topps and holding 20-year exclusive deals with MLB, NFL, and NBA. Fans already associate Fanatics with low-quality merchandise, and collectors fear the same pattern will devastate the card market, echoing every previous era of corporate consolidation in the hobby's history.