Slabnomics Deep Dive Episode 15: Valuing Messi With Brady

 Slabnomics: The intersection of collecting investment and market theory for sports cards.

 -Market Inefficiencies & Conviction 

- Cross-Market Comparisons 

How do we use Tom Brady's sports card market to evaluate Messi's for cards with old comps?

- Liquidity, Scarcity, and Pricing Power 

- Valuation Convergence & Mispricing 

- Using Outcomes and Catalysts.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Slabnomics, the intersection of collecting investment and market theory for sports cards. This is episode 15, a deep dive cross-valuation. This is going to be a special episode because I'm going to take one of my pillars of Slabnomics, which is show me the math, and I'm going to apply that into sports cards so that we can see valuations, see how they stack up, and make better informed investment decisions. Glad to have you guys on. Imagine staring at a market that everyone thinks is bulletproof. Everyone's cashing checks, everyone's smiling. You're the only guy in the room saying, wait a second, this math doesn't add up. That was Michael Bury in the mid-2000s. Bury wasn't flashy. He wasn't Wall Street polished. He was a doctor who ran an investment fund from his own office, wearing shorts, blasting heavy metal. But what did he have? An obsession with details. While everyone else skimmed through mortgage bonds, Burry actually read them, line by line, prospectus by prospectus. And what he found was what no one else thought was possible. The entire housing market was built on loans to people who had no chance of paying them back. Now here's the thing. When you find an inefficiency that big, you expect people to thank you for pointing it out. Instead, he got laughed at. Banks mocked him, his own investors called him crazy. Everyone asked if he'd lost his mind. Imagine trying to explain to people the entire U.S. housing market is about to collapse. Literally the roof over their heads. Nobody wanted to hear it. But Burry had conviction. He invented a trade that didn't even exist yet: credit default swaps, essentially shorting the housing market. And he stuck to it. He lost money on paper for years while his own investors were hounding him, threatening to sue him. And every headline was screaming housing boom forever. Against all odds, he trusted the numbers. When the cracks finally showed, mortgage defaults spiked. Wall Street's safe securities started imploding. The same guys who laughed at him were suddenly begging for a seat at the table. And Burry? He walked away with billions for his fund and vindication that sometimes the market isn't just wrong. They're catastrophically blind. So this is the Michael Burry lesson. Inefficiencies correct themselves. The hard part isn't just spotting them, it's having the stomach and the conviction to hold on while the world calls you insane. Today, what we're going to look at is two similar assets in order to ascribe value to them. One is the 2012 Panini Prism Tom Brady Silver, number 116. The second is the 2012 Panini Prism Lionel Messi Prisms, number 12, as a mouthful. So why did I choose to compare these two cards? The challenge for looking at different players across different markets is that the card markets can be vastly different, even if the status for the players can be similar. For instance, we look at Messi and Tom Brady as respective GOATs of their profession, but it's difficult for their card markets to reflect the same pricing. So the real question is if soccer were to become as popular in the card markets as football, would we see a jump in Messi prices to reflect those of Tom Brady? Or on the other side, is Messi's market actually more expensive than Tom Brady's already? What do you think? So the first thing to understand in comparing these two markets is that each of them has two submarkets. There's a high-end market and a low end market. And it's very important to separate these out because they behave very differently from each other. The high end market is very illiquid. It's a very small pond where very big fish swim. The lower end market is a large pond where the most liquidity is going to be within the market. We're going to leave aside the high-end market for now because the high-end market usually reflects the same values for these players. So very interesting find there. You can find it on my Instagram. Give it a look. But looking at the low end market is where I see a lot of inefficiencies when I'm comparing cards. So I chose these two cards within the low-end market because we have more liquidity and because they're both the first year of Prism. The first year of Prism is very notable because it's the entry point for Panini into the market with their flagship product through both sports. Choosing the Prism set and the first year of it is due to it being very difficult to compare rookie markets for these two players. They came to the market at similar times with 2002 for Tom Brady being his rookie year for cards, 2004 being it for Leonel Messi. However, the similarities stop at the time period. The cards for Messi are second-rate sets in the Moondy Chromo in the Bis versus the flagship products already for that time in Bowman as well as Topps Chrome. In order to find these valuations, we need to use market legacy and design framework so that we don't get lost trying to do these comparisons. Looking at the market between these two players, you might be surprised to find that Messi's market is actually way bigger. The soccer market in general, worldwide, is way bigger. I know that seems crazy to all you football heads out there, but at the end of the day, football is very localized to the US, as well as a little bit of Australia and some collector activity in Asia, but that's about where it stops. And soccer is worldwide. The only place that's not truly dominating all other sports is here in the US. And of course, we might say, well, what does that matter? It's just one country among all the others, right? There's one crucial reason why this isn't the case. That's due to North American dominance when it comes to the card resale market. According to a research report from Verified Market Research in 2024, the North American market contributes 52% of the entire resale market worldwide. Hand in hand with that, soccer is massive worldwide. And this is the only place in the world that is not big, is that 52% market share place. So the entire investment theory for why soccer is going to mature is because the World Cup is going to come to the United States and that's going to ignite the fandom of the collector base that it needs to ignite. If Messi enters into the low-end market at the same rate as Tom Brady's low-end market for here in the United States, they should equate in value just from a market perspective. It might even be bigger. So Messi has the possibility to have a much, much bigger market than Tom Brady. And we've already seen this in the high-end market. So a check for Messi in the market department. In the legacy department, the second part of MLT valuation, where is Messi's legacy compared to Tom Brady? Now, Tom Brady won a lot. What he did in terms of winning Super Bowls will probably go down as the greatest achievement in all of sports. Dominating team games through a dynasty is so incredibly hard for long periods of time. Look at Messi himself. He's won one World Cup. It's that hard to be able to do it at the world stage at the right time, to stay healthy, to stay motivated, to keep that chip on the shoulder, to motivate everyone around you, to have certain things bounce your way in terms of luck. And Tom Brady was able to get a Super Bowl ring seven times. Unfathomable. Tom Brady has more Super Bowl wins than any NFL franchise cumulatively through their entire history. So when it comes to winning, Tom Brady gets it. Sometimes winning is everything, but when it comes to how people remember you and the image and the imprint that it leaves on your fans and future generations, it isn't everything. And the aura and the persona of Messi is just as strong as Tom Brady. And I believe he will also be in the public eye at the same level that Tom Brady is. One way that we can try and measure this is to look at legacy by Google Trends. You can search Lionel Messi, you can search Tom Brady. You can see how they stack up and how many times they're Googled, and that might give you an idea how much they enter into the zeitgeist of that era. But Messi is playing right now, Tom Brady is not. However, I'm sure if you Google Tom Brady, you look at his trends, they're going to be very high because he remains in the public eye, which is extremely good for his card market over a long period of time. If a player decides to hermit and go out of the public eye, their legacy is normally going to fade a little bit. But I believe Messi, linking up with David Beckham at Inter Miami, he's going to be shown the path by Beckham to continue to capitalize on sponsorships and to be where the money is. So in terms of legacy, you could give a slight nod to Tom Brady, but I think over time you'll find that these two, especially with Messi being such a worldwide figure, Messi is going to edge out Tom Brady in the long run. The third part of market legacy and design is design. And this is where we have equal footing. Both of these are the first set of Panini Prism, which for me is a top-tier set. Both of these are going to be the silver asset class. We're going to find that the populations are going to be different, but we will account for this in a conservative way. Both of these are going to be cards that in 20, 30, 40 years, people are still going to be look for, are still going to be looking for and still collecting. So if you look at all three of the market legacy and design factors, we're going to have some nods to messy, but overall a pretty equal playing field. If valuation comes down to those fundamentals, and we expect that the market will catch up when things are inappropriately priced. Because if you don't believe that, there's no real reason to buy and sell cards, right? You can't just wait for other events to change the picture. You should also be looking for times when the market is improperly valuing players. It happens all the time. And the market will oscillate. And usually what's going to happen is the market overcorrects when it realizes something. Now, for instance, for my soccer guys out there, you have Messi versus Ronaldo. And what's happened is they were equal with each other for a very long time. And then come around 2022, they decoupled because their legacies went very different directions. Cristiano Ronaldo went to Saudi, started playing over there, and really tarnished his legacy a little bit. Now, in effect, who Cristiano Ronaldo is was borne out by that move to Saudi Arabia. He decided to go for the money. He decided to go for the bad boy attitude. Messi followed a more traditional path, and I think he did things that would be more celebrated by the soccer community as a whole. On the football side, Tom Brady versus Patrick Mahomes. Those are the big two of our generation. And for a while it looked like Mahomes was going to be right up there with Brady. Well, he's won three Super Bowls in seven years. That's pretty good. But let's say that pace declines. Let's say Andy Reid retires. Let's say Mahomes gets injured and just doesn't come back the same. There's many variables of risk. And those at first were ignored in the market because people were caught up in a swell of optimism. And people probably thought he could win 12 to 15 Super Bowls. But at the end of the day, there's too many risk factors to bake that in. It's easy to say he's a goat after a few years when he's tossing 50 touchdowns a year and he's winning every Super Bowl. But it gets a little bit more complicated when that production goes down. They lose Tyreek Hill, Travis Kelsey is getting older, Andy Reid is getting older. Who knows what happens in the future? And Patrick Mahomes' market has reflected that. On the high end, I would say it hasn't reflected as much, but there's still been some dips. So Tom Brady, in a similar fashion to Messi, I think is very easy to hold up as the GOAT of this generation. And I think on the soccer side, it is unanimous at this point. So that being said, let's actually get into the numbers. So what I want to do is I want to look at the PSA 10s and the BGS 9.5s true gems and find out how much of a price difference we have for these first year silvers for these two GOAT players. So 2012 Tom Brady Silver Prism in a PSA 10 went for$9,075 in March of 2025. The BGS 95 went for$5520. So$5,520 in March of 2025. So again, the difference between PSA and BGS is something we'll circle back to. But very important to note,$9,000 versus$5,500. Let's head over to the messy numbers. So the 2014 World Cup Prism, you know, Messi Silver, one of my favorite cards. The PSA 10 hasn't sold publicly since August 2024. When it did sell, it was a little bit over$2,000,$2,012.65. The BGS95 just went for$1,699 in August of 2025. Now, this is a numbers heavy podcast, so I'm going to take a little break to let you guys know that this podcast is on YouTube. So if that is easier for you, head over to YouTube, subscribe to me there, check out the video there. I'm also on Instagram under slapnomics. If you don't follow me there, I do a lot of videos that are going to boil this stuff down, make it easier to ingest. So again, we have about$1,700 for the BGS True Gem 9.5 a few days ago in August. And then last time we had that PSA 10, we are seeing just above$2,000 in 2024. So this is why it's complicated. Because liquidity is something that gives us price discovery. When things are buying and selling all the time, we're able to see market shifts reflected in prices. Whereas in a set like this, that often trades private sales, you don't usually see those market impulses. And the messy move has been massive over the past year. So if I'm looking to evaluate between these two, where Tom Brady's silver has sold within the last six months, we've seen it in the PSA 10, we've seen it in the BGS 95 True Gem, versus the messy possibility with soccer World Cup coming up in the United States next year. And I say, well, I think that it must be undervalued just because people aren't pricing everything in because the North American market isn't online for soccer. Well, how can I justify that when there aren't cops? How can I look at past prices and find out if they're going to be higher in the future? What we do is we use this Brady Silver as the key to the valuation map. It fills in the pieces of the puzzle like the PSA 10 to the BGS 9.5 premium, and then it gives us a standard for what a GOAT first Prism silver should look like. Now, the first thing I want to highlight out of there is the PSA to BGS premium. Because a PSA 10 sold in the same month as a BGS 9.5 TrueGem, we have the standard of comparison between what a PSA and what a BGS went for. In this case, the premium for the PSA was 36%. It sold for 36% more than its counterpart True Gem. So if we are looking at a true gem selling for only 64% of a PSA 10, we have one piece to the puzzle in trying to figure out where Messi's true gem should be, but we also don't know where the PSA 10 should be yet because it hasn't sold for a year. So how do we figure out where that PSA 10 price should be so that we could then apply the same PSA premium that we did in the Brady example to figure out what our BGS95 should be? Well, we can use card ladder value because what card ladder does is they look at the index and then they push it forward for cards that haven't been sold in that time period. So what card ladder says is that if a PSA 10 for that Messi Silver World Cup sold in 2024 for$2,012.65, the card ladder value for that same PSA 10 should currently be$4,270. So a little bit more than double. And Messi's market since August of last year has doubled. In fact, it's doubled in the past like three months. So I think that's a pretty fair estimation to say that a silver has doubled. If we assume that, and you could tell me I'm wrong, you could say it shouldn't be double, but there's only one listed for sale right now, and that's on eBay, and it's for$7,500. Now you might ask, why does it command such a premium? Well, in the MLD valuation that we talked about, one of the big things that sets the market for a card is its rarity. And these sets are much different than your 2024 sets that you're used to, right? The graded print run for silvers in modernity is sky high. Thousands, thousands of cards, especially for Zerzion, for Laminia Mall, for Shy Gildas Alexander, for Cam Ward, for all the modern players in all sets. But the population report for the Lionel Messi 2014 World Cup Prism Silver in a PSA 10, there are 39. Okay. 39. In the BGS95, there are 32. So between the two, there are 71 mint gem copies of the first Prism Silver for Messi. Now I want to compare that since I'm on that number already, 71, to the Tom Brady silver in 2012. There's even less. Okay. So there's 21 copies of a PSA 10 versus the 39 of Messi, so about half. And then BGS95, there are 18 versus the versus the 32. So again, just a little bit less than half on both. All right. So so just from a market perspective, if we had an entirely fair market, with Tom Brady's population counts being half in this specific silver card to Messi's corresponding first silver card, the values of the Tom Brady cards should be double if everything else is equal. Right. Now, as you can assume from me recording this podcast, they are not, right? Otherwise, we wouldn't have much of a podcast. I would just say, well, everything's good. Let's go. Uh, thanks for listening. Remember back to what we were saying about the numbers for what these valuations are. The Tom Brady PSA 10 in that silver, 9,000 bucks. The Messi PSA 10 in card letter value is 4,270. So that's actually pretty close, but it's still 600 bucks off or so. And we haven't seen that sell yet. I still think that if you're able to work out a good deal and you have some good negotiation tactics, if you're able to find one of these PSA 10s and get one for say$3,500 even, getting it for$1,500 more than the last comp. 75% more than the last comp, you are still absolutely winning in terms of market value because that$3,500 is about$1,000. Is less than it should be, just comparing it to a Brady Silver. And that is assuming that their markets are the same. And if you remember back to when I was speaking earlier, I really think that Messi's market should be higher than Tom Brady's. And I know that football guys are going to be like, this guy's on crack, but let me tell you, when the World Cup comes here to America and you see the energy around it, you will understand why. So Messi's silver 10 is already undervalued compared to the silver 10 of Brady. Just in terms of Cardlara value, if someone plunked down the$4,200, you would still be making about$600,$700 in terms of value realized. Now look at let's look at the BGS. Okay, let's look at the Beckett because this is where you hammer home some value. If you remember on the Brady side, when we had a sale around the same time as the PSA 10, it was$5,520, which was 36% less than its PSA counterpart. Where do you think the Messi silver BGS 9.5 is? Well, if we back it out and we just take half of that price point because it's at about twice the supply, you know, that puts Messi and Tom Brady at an equal playing field, then the card should be about$2,700. That doesn't even factor in the price movement from March to today for the Tom Brady card. I think just mathematically being conservative,$3,000 for a BGS 9.5 in the Messi silver.$3,000 versus the$4,200 in a PSA$10. It was$1,699. Off. Alright. I bought it. Alright. That's uh the little reveal here. I bought the BGS 9.5 true gem that's been on eBay for the last month, had it on the watch list, kept trying to figure out the evaluation for it, and you hem and you haw, and there's no price discovery. I'll tell you what, I think I have the last comp for a BGS 9.5 before that.$950 back May 1st. Now that wasn't a true gem, so it's not apples to apples. Sort of summarize all of those numbers to wrap all of them together, right? I believe fundamentally that Messi's market should be valued more than Tom Brady's. That's gonna be a hot take for pretty much anybody that's not a soccer fan. But if you dive down into the numbers and you look at worldwide fandom and the numbers for Lionel Messi and the numbers for World Cup and the numbers for soccer, I think you'll find that you have no choice but really to agree when it comes down to the math. And the one obstacle that we have is that the North American market isn't on board, and that's where the money is. But I can tell you right now, the messy market has already started moving. It's already starting to reprice and revalue. And we haven't seen this in a lot of the rarer cards, the ones that don't trade as much. These cards where there's 71 gems and where people hoard them because they're an amazing set. So these are the things to look for. These are the market inefficiencies that, like Michael Burry, we wait for the market to catch up to what's correct. Because mathematically it will always happen. And what usually happens is that the market just doesn't correct, it overcorrects. And when the market overcorrects, that's when you have selling opportunities because it doesn't just go back to where it should be. I don't think this BGS95 is going to go to 3K. I think it's gonna go to 4K, might go higher, but I'll tell you that the PSA 10 is probably not going to sell until it's at 4,500 or 5,000. If I had to stake my claim on something, I would say the PSA 10 silver for Messi is going to sell for 5K next. I think when that happens, everyone's going to look at it and say, oh shit, my bad. Now we have proof. It's too late when you have proof. That means everyone else who's been waiting has also seen the proof. And now the market has ticked up. But right now you have this lag. When there's another out for this that I haven't talked about yet. So quick tangent, if you're not familiar with poker terms, an out is poker slame for an outcome with which you can win your hand. So if you have multiple outs, you increase your overall probability to win. For example, if you have four cards to a straight and four cars to a flush off the flop, it means you have two tries to catch 17 different cards to have a monster hand. So back to sports cards. Maximizing outs for your sports cards investments is a great way to win more frequently. In this case, another out that we haven't talked about yet is that Beckett can increase their brand strength, which then cuts down on that PvP premium and theoretically will raise the market price of all Beckett 9.5 slaps. Now, I believe this is an eventuality. I don't know if Beckett is going to be the one to come back, but they probably have the best gambling odds. And when someone else comes back, PSA prices are probably going to go down overall. So right now, that seems crazy. PSA is absolutely crushing the market. But even as recent as September of 2023, the Tom Brady Silver Prism sold for 7,850. And the Beckett True Gem, just True Gem, sold for$7,500 a month before. Almost equal.$300 off is pretty much a rounding error when you're talking about those numbers. Not only can you get a BGS 9.5 for far below where it usually is compared to the PSA 10 counterpart, but also the very catalyst that we need to bring Messi's market into abeyance, to bring Messi's market into fair market value, is coming. And we know exactly when it's coming. World Cup 2026. That's when the North American market comes online for soccer. The marketing machine of the United States is going to make that happen. All the indicators out there are showing that that's going to be the case. Look at Christian Polisic sitting out of the gold cup, everybody getting a tiff about it. Well, you know how much that guy's worth to the United States next year? There is no one else in the United States that has a fraction of the marketing brand power that Christian Polisic does. He is worth billions to what the United States is about to do. So there's three reasons why buying a BGS 9.5 uh Messi Silver 2014 Prism is just a great investment to make. And I put my money where my mouth is. I'm the last comp on it. I paid well over what the last comp was before it. I came on. But now you guys have the guideposts. I want you guys to know the line of thinking, that market legacy and design valuation, how we can practically apply it, and how we wait for the market to catch up with its price discovery. Because going back to that Michael Burry story, he made the biggest bet. I mean, the guy was going illiquid month to month, paying on these swaps, but he had conviction in what he was doing. And eventually being able to gut all that out and probably now having stomach ulcers for the rest of his life, he was making the right play. And that's what we need to do in order to bring an investment style into the sports card hobby. So I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. I hope that this provided some value for you guys as to how we can use concepts and to use math in order to make a confident play in what we're doing. So this has been Slabnomics episode 15, deep dive into cross evaluation. Thanks so much for listening. Keep building, and I'll talk to you later.