Explaining Alpha and the 82.5% Gain in Soccer Card Market

Solo Pod - Slabnomics helps sports card enthusiasts make better financial decisions.

Is soccer’s card market in a real bull run—or just riding a rising tide? In this Slabnomics episode, Matt breaks down alpha vs. index returns, shows how to use CardLadder indices as a benchmark, and dissects why soccer is outpacing other sports. We compare Messi 71 BIS and Ronaldo 2002 Mega Craques rookies, first-year Kabooms (2017 Messi/Ronaldo vs. 2013 LeBron/Kobe), population counts, comps, and price discovery in an illiquid market.

What you’ll learn

• How to measure alpha: CL50 vs. sport-specific indexes (soccer vs. baseball/football).
• Why World Cup 2026, Fanatics’ marketing, and cultural momentum matter for soccer cards.
• Using indexes to avoid self-congratulation in a bull market.
• How to sanity-check comps, spot pump-y prints, and triangulate value (supply, demand, pops).
• Deep dives: Messi 71 BIS (PSA 10) run-up; Ronaldo Mega Craques (PSA 10) price discovery; 2017 Kaboom Messi/Ronaldo vs. 2013 LeBron/Kobe.
• Why liquidity concentrates at the top (GOATs) and what that means for risk/reward.

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Disclaimer: Educational content only. Not financial advice.

TAGS / Keywords: soccer cards, Messi 71 BIS, Ronaldo 2002 Mega Craques, kaboom Messi, kaboom Ronaldo, kaboom LeBron, kaboom Kobe, CardLadder index, CL50, sports card investing, price discovery, population report, PSA 10, BGS 9.5, comps, World Cup 2026, Fanatics, Tom Brady hobby, emerging markets, liquidity, alpha vs beta

Hashtags
#SoccerCards #SportsCards #Messi #Ronaldo #Kaboom #PSA10 #CardLadder #WorldCup2026 #SportsCardInvesting #Alpha #PriceDiscovery #Fanatics

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to Slabnomics. I have a special episode for you guys today that's going to deal with two things alpha and explaining the crazy movements in the soccer card market. Now, before we get into that, I want you guys to make sure that if you're not subscribed on the YouTube platform, to give that a try. If you like seeing different card pictures and seeing numbers on screen, this is going to be a heavy numbers episode. If you would rather take it in the ears instead of the eyes, go ahead and make sure you're subscribed to Spotify, Apple, or whatever podcast platform you have. That being said, in order to understand the movements in the soccer card market, I want to talk to something that Chris Hoge was speaking about in his Hoge Cast recently. His HogeCast is something that I highly recommend to all of my listeners. It is incredible because Chris himself is very intelligent and he marks things very succinctly. He brings up very excellent thought experiments that I really enjoy myself. So be sure to subscribe to follow him at Chris underscore H O J on Instagram. Now, Chris was speaking about how we are in a bull market. And the bull market is traditionally defined as two quarters, 20% growth. So he looked at the sports card market broadly and he said we're in a bull market. That's a change from where we've been the last few years. And he also mentioned some comparisons to the 2020, 2021 bull market period. Now, that is incredibly important contextual evidence, right? We're in a bull market. And as he talked about, the rising tide is going to lift all boats. So how do we find out if, as he's saying, we should just be congratulating ourselves because of the moves we made, or if alternatively, the rising tide is lifting all boats and the markets are just all going up. So all of our cards are going up. Well, we can do that by using indexing. And this is something that's borrowed from the stock markets, right? You look at the SP 500, you can get more granular and go into this specific index. Looking at indexes is how we can figure out if we are providing something called alpha in our investments. Alpha is the difference between investments we are looking at and the broad market performance. What that looks like on the stock market is usually going to be the SP 500 and how the stocks that I have are outperforming or underperforming that. That's what mutual fund managers do who do this for a living. So let's take that and let's bring it into the card market, shall we? For the card ladder 50, which card ladder uses as the 50 hand-picked cards that best represent a market, that index is up 27% over this past year. Now that's an incredible rate of return, and we sure haven't seen that since those 2020, 2021 days. However, let's compare that against the broad sports indexes. In baseball, it's up 14% over the same period. So in football, that's 17% to the gain, but still, it's trailing that CL50 by 10%. Now, soccer, soccer is up 82.5% over the last year. So I totally understand what Chris is saying. Have caution. Understand that everything is going up, and you need to be looking at what you're doing and making sure that you're making the best investments for yourself and you aren't congratulating yourself for something that's just happening around you instead of through you. But the soccer card movement is not just because of the TIS. Soccer is outperforming the CL50 27% to 85%. Okay. Soccer has other influences that aren't just these broad sports markets happening. Okay. That has to do with the World Cup. That has to do with it being such a small market and not enough money flowing into it to equate things. So that's number four. Historical analogies. There's other headwinds that other sports are going through right now. Look at the NFL with CTE. Baseball is declining a little bit. And you know what? There's a couple headwinds as well for other sports. In the NFL, CTE has people not really putting their children. The CTE has moms and dads not really putting their kids into football. We have baseball a little bit going the way of the dodo, not as many watch numbers on that. So soccer has filled some voids as well, in addition to those tailwinds that are across the broader market and with the World Cup. So it's a convergence of these factors. Lastly, he mentioned it's a matter of confusion because it just isn't making any sense. So that was kind of his biggest warnings. That was his biggest warning bell was it isn't making sense. Be on your toes for this. And always be on your toes, right? When money is flowing into something, there's always bad actors. Be careful, sleep on things, and make sure it makes sense by the math. But if it makes sense by the math and if you believe where something is going, don't be afraid to take measured risks that you can afford, not that you can't afford, okay? Money that you can lose for things that you do believe in. Don't be afraid to be wrong, but always be safe. Look, soccer valuations were muted by illiquidity for years. We have a sudden influx of new liquidity and cultural momentum, and the market is recalibrating. It's not defying logic. So price discovery is that forgotten third brother between supply and demand when it comes to economics. Supply, demand, now we're getting price discovery. And you're seeing that on these cards that don't transact as much. And we're going to get into that a little bit. So to recap those five things, talking about soccer card movements and Patrick Ryan, he talked about the World Cup catalyst, market size, pump claims, historical analogies, and confusion about structure. So why don't we go into some concrete examples about what's going on in soccer? I'm going to lay out the numbers for you. If they still don't make sense at the end, good. You've reasoned your way through it. You've seen things that don't make sense to you, and you've decided, I don't want to go that route. But if they do make sense to you, keep thinking about how you can move those kind of ideas forward, how you can keep making better financial decisions through that, because that's what Slapnomics is all about. So I'm going to go over a couple examples first, just within soccer. Okay. Let's look at what's happened with the Ronaldo rookie card, which is the 2002 Mega Cracks, and the Messi 71 Bis. Okay. The price movements for these are very different, but also very similar in a way, which is a good thing. So let's start with Messi and go backwards. The Messi 71 BIS in a PSA 10 allegedly went for over a million about a week ago. Biggest sale that there's ever been for that card by far, including COVID, including everything. Now, a month before that, it was at 825K that it sold. So within a month, it went up about 175K, which is a pretty large movement, right? Now, before that, the Messi 10 hadn't sold for a long time. In fact, it hadn't sold since January of 2024. So we're looking about 18 months since the last public sale of that card. Do you remember what the sale was in January 2024? 322,000. Okay. So it's tripled in 18 months. And I think most of that price appreciation did not come from January 2024 until January 2025. That price appreciation pretty much started this year, I would say around February, around March is when it started moving. So 3X. That sounds crazy, right? Well, there's not a lot of them. There are 20 PSA 10s in the 71 bis, and there are 75 BGS gems. So 95 total gems. And who knows how many of those BGS 9.5s have been cracked and tried. So we're talking about not very many for someone who has 95 cards. Let's just assume that there's 95 gems. All right. Football, meaning soccer, has three billion worldwide fans. All right. Three billion. American football is estimated to be about 200 to 400 million. That's a big number. Versus 3 billion. Okay. Let's talk about how popular Messi is just as a player. And just using that football analogy as well, because I know I'm talking to a lot of people in America, Tom Brady has 15 million followers. Pretty popular guy. Messi has 506 million followers on Instagram. He owns like three of the top-liked posts of all time. So is it crazy to say that if there's 95 gems of this player who is the most popular player to ever play any sport? It's not crazy that one of the 20 PSA gems went for over a million. What does that card look like in, say, 20 years? Do you think it goes down? I don't. So that's a little bit about Messi's price movement. And again, that went from 322K in 2024, beginning of 2024, to 25K, a massive jump in the matter of about 18 months. And then a couple weeks later, crossed over the million mark. Crazy movements, but it was fundamentally undervalued since. So it makes sense if you start looking at the numbers and you look at the fandom and you look at collecting appetite for the biggest sport in the world, bar none. So that's the 71 bis rookie for Messi. And things get complicated with all the rookies because he has a whole bunch of them. And the demand versus Ronaldo is something that I talk about a lot in my podcasts and in my slapnomics Instagram. But let's talk about Ronaldo's megacracks of 2002. First of all, let's talk about population first. Get that out of the way. So we have some apples to apples with the 71 bis. There are 38 PSA 10s, but there are only 41 BGS 9.5s. So that's 79 total gems, which is less than Messi's 95. But Messi has about half of the PSA 10s. So nuance always creates inefficiencies. But let's just even say that they're equal in terms of supply. Also not true because Messi has all those other rookie cards. So the appetite for investing is totally different. But be that as it may, how has Ronaldo's rookie card moved when we said that Messi's went up 3x in 18 months? So Ronaldo's Mega Cracks sold for 80K in June of this year in a PSA 10. All right. 80K, that's far less than that 322K mark that Messi set, right? Well, things weren't really moving for Ronaldo as quickly as they were for Messi, but in the last couple months, the price movement for Ronaldo has started ticking up quite a bit. But August 27th, 2025, which is about two weeks ago from when I'm recording this, it sold for 175K. So it more than doubled from June to August to late August, which is actually tracking where Messi was over that time period. But it still wasn't correct because growing up, it was always Messi, Ronaldo, 1A, 1B, but they decoupled in 2022. And Messi's market, by some standards, which I've gone over in their market caps of their rookies. I did a comparison between if you got all the gems of the rookies of Ronaldo versus all the gem rookies of Messi, what does it equate to? And Messi's market was 4x Ronaldo's. Now I think it's caught up a little bit since then, but that's just to tell you how much it was underperforming versus Messi's during this time until recently. August 29th, 2025, all of a sudden we have a new price discovery. We have a new comp 288,000. Now, this is where some people that are highly respected, and understandably so, start thinking that there's a pump and dump going on. These numbers don't make sense. It couldn't have appreciated almost two and a half X over two days, right? I totally get that. But let's look at the numbers here. So it sold for 288K, still less than its record of October 2021, which was 312K. Okay, so stay with me on the numbers here. It sold for 312K in October 2021. It sold for 288K recently. Right? So still under that. Here's the crazy thing. Remember Messi's card that sold over a million? The highest it had ever sold, even during COVID, was 312,000. And that was in 2022. So Ronaldo's rookie at its peak sold for 312,000 in October 2021. Messi's card before all this, its peak sold for 312,000 in 2022. The exact same cost. Okay. This was before the World Cup when Messi won the World Cup. This was before Ronaldo became tier instead of being tier 1B with Messi. They sold for exactly the same. Okay. So Ronaldo's card running up. Whoa, crazy, all the way up to 200k. Well, Ronaldo hasn't achieved the heights of his card yet. Messi's going 3x his card. Which one's more crazy? Is there room for Ronaldo's rookie to run to X what it was in COVID? If Messi's has gone 3x what it was, makes sense to me. Would not be surprised if Ronaldo's card goes over 500K or 600K at some point. So the rookies get a little bit different because their markets are very difficult. They have different pops. They have Messi with all these cards, Ronaldo with only his one and one sticker. But that's another thing in the favor of Ronaldo's investment appetite. So sure, the run-up's been crazy, but I still think that things aren't valued the way that they should be, especially where Ronaldo will be, where his legacy is going to be throughout time. What has that looked like over a year though? Messi's one-year change in his broad market as tracked by Card Ladder is 179% Yauza. Rinaldo's is 196%. Almost 20% more. Okay. And it's still sitting at these levels that are so much less than Messi. And that's because we had that decoupling in 2022. It's because people stopped looking at him as a GOAT. And a lot of soccer heads will tell you they shouldn't have, right? That that was just public perception. Everybody got mixed up. So Ronaldo to me has a lot more room to run. I think everyone came through the Messi gate. They put all the money into Messi. It's the safe play. It's the goat. You can't lose by buying the goat. And now they look at Messi and they're like, okay, yeah, things have definitely gone up. And then they're like, why is Ronaldo sitting here? Now we've looked at soccer. We've looked at how there's inefficiencies between Ronaldo and Messi. We've looked at how the market itself has gone up. The alpha is done, first of all, going through an investing index, which has higher return yield. So looking at soccer, the reason that's gone 85%, whereas Card Ladder's index has gone 27%, is because there's more tailwinds for soccer and it's a smaller market. So everybody's rushing through that door. It's the opposite of a short squeeze. If you've seen the GameStop movie, if you've seen the big short, right? A lot of people trying to go through a very small door. That's what soccer has been this year. And that's what soccer will continue to be, in my opinion, right? Formulate your own opinions. This is not investment advice, but I believe that this is something that the marketing machine hasn't really turned out yet. You're not hearing about World Cup. You're not hearing, you're not seeing Christian Polistic's face everywhere. You're just seeing the effects where everybody's positioning themselves at the high end. Will that trickle down into the smaller end stuff? I don't know. Rising tide does lift all boats, but liquidity only gets stretched so far. Now, that's indexing through a specific sport, right? Soccer is outperformed, all the other sports, but let's look at specific players within the sports and let's compare with similar archetypes because I find that to be something that's really useful. And let's just use goats so that we're not arguing about who equals who in what sport. Let's look at two goats, Messi Ronaldo, and let's compare them against LeBron and Kobe. And we're gonna use a similar card. So again, a lot of numbers. Go to YouTube if that helps with this. But I'm going to use the first year kaboom of Messi Ronaldo, and I'm gonna compare it against the first year kaboom numbers of LeBron and Kobe. All right, so this is what we get Messi 2017 kaboom, just sold recently. If you know the price, nicely done. Its population is 44 and 25 on the gems, so 44 PSA 10s, 25 gems for BGS. It last sold September 6th for 26.8K. Whoa! I tried to buy one for 10K at the Soko Expo a month ago. And he turned me down. Very wise of him. You know why that's crazy? Because two weeks ago it sold for 11.4K. Two weeks before that, I was trying to pay 10K. But June 30th, which was a month before that, it went for 8.3. All right. So June 8.3, end of July, Matt's trying to pay 10. A month later, it goes for 11.4. And then a month later, it goes for 26.8K. Now that's huge in terms of a jump, right? Even I'm gonna say that's a lot of movement in a very short period of time, especially with something that has a pop that big. Now, again, if you're looking at about 70 total gems, that's not massive by any stretch of the imagination, especially for a first year kaboom. But you look at other populations, let's go into those and you'll see why it's a little bit bigger. And I think maybe a little bit of a reach by the market on that Messi kaboom. 2017 Ronaldo kaboom, all right, easy comparison. There are 14 gems in PSA and there are 11 in BGS, 25. Okay, almost a third of the population of Messi's twins. So if you have a Ronaldo kaboom and you want to sell it, come to me. I will buy it from you. It last sold for$4,500. For$4,500 in October 2024. And the most it went for before that during COVID on the tail end was$5,200. Messi's just sold for$20k, and there are three times as many of them versus Ronaldo's. So by supply and demand, even if you think Messi should be worth three times what Ronaldo is for the same card, Ronaldo's kaboom from 2017 and a PSA 10 should be worth$27,000. Think about that price appreciation. Think about if you saw that happen in the marketplace, if you just saw a$27,000 sale, you'd be like, whoa, that's crazy. It's over$4,500 before. Triangulate through the numbers. So if you can get a hold of a Ronaldo 2017 kaboom, amazing if you want to sell it to me, amazing. My DMs are open. Now, those are two soccer players. And I told you, and I didn't lie to you, that we're going to compare it against another sport. Okay. So let's look at LeBron and Kobe. 2013 is the first year kabooms for them. So let's look at pop counts, let's look at dollar values, and let's try and make sense of this. Now, first of all, I want to say basketball market is way. Smaller than soccer in terms of fandom. Okay. Not in terms of sports cards. Just people watching, people that get excited about it. All right. Even if we say they're equal markets in terms of sports card appetite, which to me, you're ignoring the bottom of this massive iceberg that is soccer. The LeBron kaboom, the first year, has a pop 12 and 5 on the BGS side. So very limited stuff, even less than Ronaldo, and it sells pretty high. So it sold for 20K in May 2025. And then in March 2025, it sold for 43K. So let's take the average of those and let's just call it 30K. Let's say a LeBron first year kaboom in a PSA 10 is worth 30K. Okay. Kobe, all right, he's got pop 22 and then 62 on the BGS side, which is closer to Messi, um, but a little bit different because there's way more BGS on it. But they sold for 25K and 30K in the same day. So pretty easy to triangulate there. Call it 27K, call it 30K if you want. Both those cars are around 30K for the first year Kobe, the first year LeBron. And that puts into perspective how crazy Ronaldo's 2024 sale of$4,500 was. Like, think about that for a second. It's one seventh of what those guys went for in their kaboom, and his population count was less than Kobe's and just a little bit more than LeBron's. One seventh? So Messi selling for 26K, he's still selling less than LeBron. He's still selling less than Kobe, and people are treating him as the unrivaled goat of the biggest sports market in the world. So I think that is a grail. People are going to look back on that one and say that 26K was incredibly cheap. So there's a little comparison about how things move and we look at the movement and we anchor ourselves. This is a fallacy. It's called anchoring. We anchor ourselves on what the price was a year ago. And that's why comps can be so dangerous. We're like, I'm not paying 10K for that Ronaldo kaboom in a 10. That's crazy. It sold for 4,500 a year ago. Why would I pay 10K? Well, if you've listened to this, hopefully you'll be able to look at it and kind of understand that price discovery, especially in an illiquid market, can be your friend or your foe, depending on how knowledgeable and informed you are. So one last thing, I know I compared different sports and we looked at alpha that way and how much alpha soccer has, so that you can beat the market of the card layer 50. But let's compare that to athletes as well and make sure that we're sanity checking one more time. So Ronaldo, I mentioned over a year, has gained 196%. Messi, if you remember, over one year, 179%. LeBron in that past one year, he's gone up 4.7%. Kobe has gone up 52%. Hot market for Kobe. Brady has gone up 22%, and that's him being in the public eye and doing the cardboard stuff. And Shohi Rani, who you might think is quadrupling, he's gone up a very, very respectable, amazing, flaming 82%, but less than half of Ronaldo and Messi because they were fundamentally undervalued. So finding those market gems that are undervalued is what lets you have this rapid price appreciation as price discovery comes in and balances imbalanced markets. So to recap, really respect a lot about the people that are pumping the brakes on some of this soccer card action. I totally get where they're coming from. The cautions that they have are warranted and things to think about. But I think in terms of market dynamics, they may be missing the forest for the trees. And I think this is just the start. We haven't even seen the marketing machine kick up. We haven't seen World Cup 2026 really have his presence known in this market yet. We haven't seen 52% of the resale market for sports cards come online for soccer. And it's up 85%. So again, do your due diligence, think about these things, go back over, think about all the numbers that I threw at you, post taste, that I threw at you just right into your face here. If you like this episode, if it made sense to you or if it helped you understand something, please consider sharing it with a friend. That really helps Labnomics grow. Definitely make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast. And that's all I have for you today, guys. Thanks so much for being here and listening. Keep building, and I will talk to you later.