🚨Huge New Comp, Bubbles, and a Cheatsheet on 2014 Prizm Pricing

Slabnomics is here to help sports card enthusiasts make better financial decisions.

In this practical, numbers-first workshop, Matt breaks down how to evaluate cards using real comps, pop data, and market velocity—through the lens of the foundational 2014 Panini World Cup Prizm set. We compare soccer vs. football Prizm set values, dissect the Messi/Ronaldo “Matchups” grails, and map how domino sales (Fanatics Collect, eBay, Goldin) become forward indicators for the next leg up.

What you’ll learn

• Set-level valuation: Why 2014 WC Prizm’s total auction value outpaces 2012 Prizm Football—and what a “top-heavy” soccer market really means.
• Card-level pricing logic: How silver, blue, red, and unnumbered Pulsars behave across Messi, Ronaldo, and Matchups—including why Matchups silvers command a monster premium.
• Population + rarity effects: How PSA pop growth (e.g., Messi silver 10s 21 → 39) changes pricing power and where scarcity still bites (e.g., Matchups red /149 with ~12% gem rate).
• Forecasting with comps: Using anchor comps (2020–2022) + soccer index levels to normalize time periods and project next sales (e.g., Messi Silver PSA 10, Matchups PSA 10s).
• Bubbles vs. tailwinds: Why today’s run-up is not COVID 2.0—and how World Cup demand + Fanatics era liquidity filter down from whales to the rest of the market.
• Practical buy/sell timing: Which signals to watch (domino auctions, pop stability, color-match premiums) and why liquidity windows beat “top-tick” fantasies.

Chapters

00:00 Intro: Why a practical valuation workshop
 02:10 How to navigate PSA set pages to assess full-set value
05:12 2014 WC Prizm vs 2012 Prizm Football (total auction value shocker)
08:30 Building the Messi/Ronaldo/Matchups spreadsheet (silvers, blues, reds, Pulsars)
14:20 Silver PSA 10s: $34k Matchups vs $17k Messi vs $7.2k Ronaldo (timing-adjusted)
19:45 Pop growth & rarity: why some 2021 comps look “off” (and how to normalize)
24:10 Live indicators: Fanatics Collect Messi Silver 10; Goldin Matchups silver/red
30:05 Bubble talk vs sector tailwinds (World Cup, Fanatics, whales → mid-tier)
36:20 Playbook: spotting the next domino and managing exits
41:30 Recap + where Slabnomics is taking this (site + tools)

Tools & sources referenced

• PSA population + set pages for total auction value
• Card Ladder index levels for time normalization
• Fanatics Collect / Goldin / eBay for live comps
• GemRate for pop-growth context

Who this is for

Collectors and investors who want data-driven conviction on soccer’s flagship set; anyone deciding between holding grails vs. compounding velocity in the Fanatics era.

Call to action

• Join the Slabnomics waitlist for the spreadsheet + ongoing dashboards: Slabnomics.com
• Subscribe for surprise drops and follow-up comp breakdowns
• Instagram: @slabnomics 

2014 Panini Prizm World Cup, Messi Ronaldo Matchups, Messi Silver PSA 10, Ronaldo Silver PSA 10, 2012 Prizm Football set value, PSA population report, GemRate pop growth, Card Ladder index, Fanatics Collect auction, Goldin Auctions, soccer card market 2025, monetary velocity cards, color-match premium, numbered parallels, Pulsar / Blue / Red Prizm.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

Welcome to an impromptu episode of Slapnomics. This is going to be a little bit different from the normal ones. Call it a practical workshop. And the reason that I am recording this at a.m. not at my usual two o'clock in the morning on a Monday, is because I want to give you guys a resource that's going to practically enable you to evaluate cards. Okay. There's a lot of this talk about monetary velocity, about MLD valuation, about how to find opportunities, but I haven't been able to run through a spreadsheet with you guys. I've prepared one today. It's through the lens of my favorite set, the 2014 World Cup Prism set. Best of all, guys, we've started to get some sales roll in. We've started to get some dominoes start falling. And one of the things that I've noticed within the soccer card industry itself, as well as the broader sports card industry, is if there aren't comps, people wait for comps. Now, as I like to say, if the comp has happened, you've already missed the boat. However, now that comps have started rolling in, we can evaluate how things have fallen according to expectation and if we're getting things right, at least directionally accurate. And then we can forecast off of that what might happen next. So I'm really excited for you guys to view all of this nerdy number stuff. If you are listening on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts, feel welcome to switch over to YouTube. If you just like it coming into the ears, I'm happy to try and make it as succinct as possible. I'm also going to cut this up a little bit and put it onto Instagram. So here we go. It's the 2014 World Cup Prism set, which was the first set that Panini made the Prism brand for in soccer. So it's a foundational set. It is clean. It is crisp. It is also worth a lot of money if you look at the set itself. I'm going to show you guys that really quick as well before I dive into this. So perhaps you say to yourself, I want to understand how much this set is valued because I want to use that as a lens to inform myself when I'm looking at different investment decisions I can make with cards. So I'm going to first search a specific card from that set. So take any card, it doesn't matter. So in this case, I'm going to pull up the silver from the 2014 set for Messi. In that set, they called it the Prism Prisms. So confusing as hell. Most people just call it a silver if you see it on eBay. But we're going to go ahead and pull that up. Where is my double prism, prism, prism? Here we go. So it's going to pull up for us the sales of this specific card. Now we want to see the set. So if you see here in this little address bar in PSA, you can back up into the actual set. So I have that highlighted for you here. Click on that, brings you to the set. Now you're going to see this number here, the total auction value. Now, is this a perfect number? Is this going to tell you all the sales that have happened? No. Okay. Private sales happen all the time. Also, I'm going to give you a little bit of a warning. In a lot of these sets, big number sales are going to constitute the majority of that set's value. For instance, the gold messy prism for this, it's a lot of that value of that$2.7 million. But I also do want to show you that it can be a good proxy for evaluating versus other sets because those problems that I put out are also going to be consistent across the sets because they're all going to be within PSA's database. They're all going to have certain cards that are going to be standing out as constituting most of the value themselves. Here's just an example. You see 2.7, let's call it 2.8 million on the total auction value for the Panini Prism World Cup set. So maybe you want to compare it to football. As you see in there, I put 2012 Prism Tom Brady. We're going to put that in the search bar, see what it pulls up. That is going to be the first set of Prism for football. That's why I use that one. So we're going to do a little bit of soccer first set of Prism versus football. Football on football, if you will. And we're also going to have the nomenclature here of the double prism. So here's the silver for Tom Brady. Beautiful stuff. Back it up into the Prism set. So you see there, 2012 Prism, total auction value 1.239 million. So if you remember the soccer won 2.7 million, more than double, this brings up an interesting thought, right? Because we think of soccer being smaller. It's a smaller market, not as huge as football. But if you look at things like this, what it shows us is that soccer, the soccer card market might seem small, but in reality, it's just top heavy. Okay. If you look at all of the sales that happen at the top, if you look at Messi's rookie, the 71 bisque going for$1.5 million, that's not cheap. It doesn't take a finance guy to tell you that ain't cheap. So there's another lens. Instead of us just constantly saying soccer is cheap, soccer is small, tiny market, look at things like that. Look at data points that say that this prism set is more than double the first football prism set. If you tell that to your football guys, they will be astounded. I'm going to bring it up to some podcasters who don't play in the soccer space. We're going to have a discussion about that. And we're going to open up some conversation about these false assumptions about the soccer card market. But I've gone on about that enough. Let's look at that Excel sheet. All right. So let's get into the weeds. Let's go into why the hell I spent hours and hours putting together a spreadsheet that has way too many numbers on it. So first off, this is the 2014 World Cup set. I chose certain parallels within this because for me, there are three main cards in this set. Now, uh, I'm there's amazing players within this, like historical great players. But for our sake and what we're trying to look at, we're going to keep it just to these three cards because I believe that the legacy of these three cards will be passed on for years and years down the line. 20 years from now, these three cards are going to be grails, holy grails in people's collections. So, first off, we have the matchups, Messi and Ronaldo on the same card. There was an insert series for the 2014 Prism featuring the matchups between those players playing in the World Cup that year. Messi and Ronaldo being on the same card with the parallels that they have. As you can see there, you have 11 parallels listed there for the matchups. I believe that this is going to get the treatment of the precious metal gems when history sorts itself out. So to me, I'm a big matchups fan, and I don't want to be too biased, but I believe that it's a generational card for two generational prospects being together in the first set of prison. You're also going to see a bunch of messy parallels and you're going to see the Ronaldo parallels. I put all of them on there. Okay. You're going to see the blue pulsars. They are supposed to be out of 55, but they do not have a serial number. Those are very difficult to evaluate and for people to agree on the values because they weren't put out specifically by Panini in the packs, and they also don't have that serial number on them, but still highly valued by collectors. They just don't follow the usual mechanics. First of all, why did I do this? All right. And I'm going to shout out an Instagram account at mostly soccer cards. At mostly soccer cards is his handle. He reached out and he said, I want to pick your brain on something. I was looking at the matchups cards versus the Ronaldo and Messi cards from 2014 Prism, and something jumped out to me as being a regular. He said, the matchups base as well as the matchups unnumbered parallels. That is, these have the matchups as being higher in value than the Ronaldo and Messi parallels of the same. So take a red and yellow pulsar for a matchups. That's going to be a higher value both in RAW and in a PSA 10 over the Messi and Ronaldo. So let me show you how that looks on the spreadsheet really quick. Let's see the matchups in the pulsar right here. We had an anchor price, which I haven't gotten into yet, but 8,800 on May of 2022. In the Messi one, we have 1445, so significantly less than the 8,800. And then on the Ronaldo side on the Pulsar, 2,339. So absolutely right by mostly soccer cards, you see such a massive differential between the matchups and the corresponding cards for just the players. But if you now go into the numbered parallels, he says, it flips. So unfortunately, a lot of the parallels don't have a lot of sales. Even when we look at these time periods of 2020 to 2022, which is where I was trying to focus to get these anchor prices, we don't have a lot of sales. We have gaps, right? There's no matchups blue gem sale. There's no messy red sale in the gem. There's no Ronaldo red or Ronaldo purple. So those gaps really make it difficult. And the color match changes things between messy and Ronaldo. You're going to see a higher price for a messy blue out of 199 than you're going to see for the messy red out of 149. It's rarer, but the color match means more. So it makes it difficult to be able to compare and contrast these things. But let's just look at the silver. Everybody loves the silver and it's an easy one to compare, right? Well, another thing about the silver, incredibly rare in this set. Okay. So matchup silver,$34,100. Okay. That's what it sold for in February 2021. If that number blows the socks off of you, if you didn't know that number, it's a crazy number compared to other things. It's just a silver, right? Well, if you look here, there are three silver matchups that are gems. And this is all PSA data. Okay. I didn't want to pull in all the BGS95s. I just wanted to keep it simple and keep it PSA 10s, which can get complicated because some of these don't have any. All right. But we're going to say PSA 10s, there's three in the matchup silvers. All right. 34,000. Only three people in the world are going to have a Messi and Ronaldo silver PSA 10. Okay. Just think about that. Like the extreme rarity in 50 years, let's say soccer becomes much more popular just in the card markets. I'm not even saying in the United States, just in the card markets for whatever reasons. Like, how many people are going to want that card? There's three of them. All right. That's why it goes for$34,000. That's why there's one up on Golden right now that's currently at$30,500 and still has two days. That thing's going to go for probably$45,000. But we'll get into that in a second as well. I keep teasing you guys with all this stuff. But let's go back to it. All right. So for$34,000 in the matchups. Let's look at the Messi. Let's look at the Ronaldo. So Messi, let's go down to silver,$17,220. Still pretty high, but that's half. Okay. That's half of the matchups. Quick aside here, our friends over at Gemrate, Ryan is my hero. I tell him every day I randomly just, I randomly just shoot him a text and say you're my hero. But there were 21 gems at the time of this comp. When this comp came down in March 2021 for$17,000, there were 21 messy gems in PSA. There are currently 39. So when we're looking at these numbers, we keep that in mind. Double the supply that we had at that time. So the Ronaldo silver sold for$7,200 in August of 2021. So I tried to get the comps as close as possible in terms of the date. So there are five months here. And what we could do is we could equalize by looking at how the index changed over that time period. So I wanted to bake in that possibility in case someone wanted to do that. And in case they were like, you know what, I want to learn more how much the market moved between March and August of 2021. Well, here you go. In March 2021, the index was here at 19,604. So we use that as a proxy for the broad soccer market. So 19,604. In August, we were at 25,000. These are off of the average percent off average. So we were 8% higher in March, and then we are 38% higher in May of 2021. So let's say it went up 30%, going back to the data. That would mean that you would take 30% off this number if you wanted to apples to apples, the messy silver and the Ronaldo silver. So basically takeoff 2K. This was about 5K when the Messi Silver went for this. Okay. So now I'm throwing a lot of numbers at you guys. So let me give you a quick recap on what we found out from the silvers, right? Silver matchups, 34,000. There are three of them. Messi matchup, Messi Silver, 17,000, and the Ronaldo silver went for 7,200 five months later. And that would equate to about 5,000 compared to Messi's 17,000. So all of that is to say that mostly soccer cards was incredibly right. I am seeing those trends of the high-end Messi Ronaldo matchups, the numbered ones, the very rare ones, are going to show a huge premium over just the Messi and just the Ronaldo cards. Now these silvers also tell us a really important point about population. So let's look. The so at the time in 2021, Ronaldo and Messi were about the same. And I know that sounds crazy to you now, but it was the case. And it was the case for many, many years. Growing up, it was always Ronaldo and Messi, right? We all heard that. We all knew it was Messi Ronaldo. They were 1A, 1B. So March 2021, the index has Ronaldo here at 147,797. And then flipping over to Messi's chart, you can see here very similar price movement on the index, but you can see here in March 2021, 130,955. So the index was actually higher for Ronaldo at that time. Now wait a second. If we're saying that Ronaldo was even a little bit higher versus Messi at that time on the index, thanks to our friends at Card Ladder, why would his silver go for so much less? If we equate to it 5,000 versus the 17,000 for Messi, an efficient market would say that that shouldn't be the case at all, right? And this is an important lesson. Inefficiencies happen. If inefficiencies didn't happen, every time you bought and sold a cart, it would just go for exactly what the market price should or shouldn't be. And if you bought and sold cards, you know that that's not the case. Okay. So hey, sometimes numbers don't make sense. But what I've found is that over time, this stuff evens out because on a long enough timeline, there's always moments where there's equalizers that come in, whether it's hype, whether it's a changing of expectations, whether it's a changing of hardware that the players get and the legacy that surrounds that. So yeah, the price for Ronaldo back then didn't make sense. But you know what? A little bit of sanity check here. If you look at the nines, 2800 in April of 2021 for Ronaldo Silver 9, 2800 in February, in January of 2021 for Messi's Silver. So there is some kind of equality, there is some kind of rationale that happens most of the time when you look at numbers. But there are also inefficiencies, and that's where opportunities are. I brought up Messi Silver. Well, well, Messi Silver is up right now on Fanatics Collect for the first time since the end of 2024 in a gem. All right. Very momentous stuff because when this domino falls, this is one of the biggest indicators for this whole set. And it's a guidepost that we're able to attach values to and triangulate off of. Watch that Fanatics Collect's Messy Silver Gem auction. It's going to tell you a lot about where the market is right now. In an episode of my podcast about a month ago, I mentioned that the next time a messy silver gem sold, it would be for$5,000, which was at the time a bold call because the last one had sold for about two grand at the end of 2024 and we just hadn't had a sale. There's no way this thing is going under 10,000 if we're right about the set of valuation, how the other data points we have feed into future sales. Because for forecasting, that's what we really need. First of all, let's establish where we are in the soccer market right now. There's been a lot of talk that I'm hearing about bubbles. Things have gone up in soccer a lot, over 200% in the past year. Things have also started rising in other markets. You see, baseball has gone up, I think it was 16% when I looked at it, 27% on football. So we have a rising tide coming because we have a lot of tailwinds coming from, I believe, fanatics collects, as well as people with a lot of money coming into the space and driving some markets, whipping up some hype. And also just bringing a fresh air of business sense and acumen, as well as new projects, unlocking technology in the sports card space. It's taking it from a hobby to an alternative asset class, which is exactly what I want for slabnomics and why we're here on the financial side. Okay, so that being said, where are we in the soccer card market? We have all these tailwinds coming. We know that people are entering into the space, and we've seen that the index is up 200% in a year. So everyone starts crying bubble because things are going up really fast. And they're going up more than everything else. Now, a bubble is when you have an unexplainable frenzy in asset class that defies all logic and defies all reason. Case in point, the tulip mania for the Dutch. They were buying and selling tulips, people were selling their houses to buy a tulip. That's wild stuff. You could say the same thing for soccer cards. Sure, you can make that argument. But you know what? You can make that argument for any sports card. Just because a piece of cardboard has a Michael Jordan picture on it doesn't mean it's worth a million dollars. And it doesn't mean that that card is worth more than a messy card or worth more than a Mickey Mano card, right? If you want to look at it that way, the entire sports card industry is a bubble because it's all just based on cardboard pictures with dudes on them. So instead of focusing on how much things have gone up, let's tie into other ways of thinking that allow us to explore if we're in a frenzy that defies logic. So let me give you a concrete example. We had a sale this past evening that I've been watching like a hawk for the last 10 days. It finally went through on Fanatics Collect. We have it there on the screen. The Messi and Ronaldo matchups in a gem for the red out of 149 went for$30,300. Why is that relevant? Well, that's a signpost of where we are because we can look back at historical data. So back to the spreadsheet. Let's look at where the highest anchor value we had for that matchup's red in Messi and Ronaldo was. Go back here,$19,212 back in May of 2022. So let's just see what That falls in terms of the past cycle. So in the past cycle, May of 2022 was right here, it was 31% off of the market average, which was actually right in line with where we were talking about for the August sale of the messy silver, which was 38%. So 38%, this one was 31%, roughly equal in terms of the last market cycle. So when the matchup's red went for 19,000, it was at the same market evaluation point as when the messy silver went for 17,220. So it went for 2K more than the messy silver. All right. Now, first off, why did the red just go for$30,000? Why did it go for$11,000 more than it went for at the height of COVID? Well, first off, there are only six of them. Now, unfortunately, I can't give you guys how many there were when we had this comp because I was unable to find on gemray the ability to go through inserts in order to find their replays. So this card's rarity has held up. These cards are really, really hard to gem, as you can see here. And it ain't no walk in the park. And if there's only 149 of them, that means that you're only getting like 15 if you pull all of them out. Right now we're at six. I think that's probably pretty consistent with where we were before when this comp happened. So we went over 30k. Card letter value put us at 24,000. So we busted past that as well. Why is it going for like 60% more than it went for at the height? Well, the market for sock, well, we keep talking about how this is just like COVID. And the interesting thing that I see about that is I ask myself, who is saying this? And who is saying this is everyone that came in to the sports card hobby during COVID. Now, I didn't come in during COVID. I came in last year. So I might not have some biases that exist for those that did come in COVID. Now, I can have other biases. In fact, I have to be guarding myself to not have the biases the other way of just seeing everything rose-colored glasses. But what I can tell you is what happened during COVID was very broad. We had this time of unrest where everyone was unable to go outside. We had a time where identity was being stifled and was being continuously restricted. Cards are a manifestation of identity. So to me, the explanation of what happened with the card market at that time is that people were searching for identity. They had a lot of free time. Those two things come together. Everyone's piling into sports cards. Now, they're piling into sports cards broadly. You have this massive influx all at the same time, worldwide, into the hobby as a whole. Now, that filtered into every sports card market and boosted numbers significantly in every market because it was a worldwide phenomenon. So the popularity of each sport boosted to those levels through the geographic lenses of where those people were coming from. Football went up a whole bunch because Americans were sitting there and they love football. Basketball went up, same thing. Asian and Australia markets also love basketball, which is one of the reasons why it's so strong in the card hobby. Baseball, again, you have America, you have Asia. And then soccer also went up because soccer was so small, especially at that point, that the market that even though a lot of other people were focused on these other markets, there was still plenty left over for people that are into soccer to make their way into sports card trading for soccer. Now, there were a lot of headwinds at that time for soccer cards specifically, because who's getting into soccer cards at that time? Mostly Europeans, other Asian countries. One of the big ones is going to be grading, or they were unable to send their cards to any graders for any rates that weren't exorbitant. The time periods to be able to send out to gradings quickly became unmanageable, especially if you're overseas. So they were restricted to pretty much raw cards. And where are they able to even buy raw cards back then? We didn't have a lot of these alternate marketplaces that we have coming online now in the past five years. So everyone looks at the soccer card market at that time and they're like, well, even during COVID, it went up and then it went back down. Well, people, it it was hard for people to get into the card market in those specific geographical places where they wanted to the most. And all the other locations were focused on the other card markets, basketball, football, et cetera, that they're more used to and they enjoy watching. Fast forward to now. Here is why this is not like COVID. Look at all the other indexes for where the sports are going. They've had some bumps. You have Tom Brady getting involved, you have fanatics starting to turn on their marketing machine, you have NFL and MLS doing collabs on their Instagrams. So why is this different than COVID? Well, everyone's not popping into all of these different sports, and you have now all of these more mature markets that are able to sell it to them. You have card hobby operating over in China, you have Alt, you have Fanatics Collect going strong, you have Golden, of course, doing what they do, and everyone's going into soccer because everyone sees the World Cup happening. There's excitement around that. I also want to say one more thing on this, because I know I've harped on this a lot, but we're going to have a bunch of Europeans coming into America, filling us with the excitement that surrounds the World Cup. Because if you've ever been to a soccer match, you know that excitement is crazy. They're bringing all that excitement here. Americans with their card love are here as 52% of the market. And that's going to all come together and coalesce into this massive, massive wave of demand. So, yes, the card market is up 207% from when I saw it before. Well, that's because a lot of this stuff doesn't make a lot of sense for how rare it is and how big the soccer market is with three billion fans. All right, matchups Red went for$30,000. There's only six of them. Messi and Ronaldo together on their Instagrams have over 1 billion followers. So if if you ask 1 billion people if they want that card, I would say a good amount of them would be like, sure, I'll take that. That's a test that I do. If I have this little card of this player, this no-name player, and I'm like, hey, do you want this card? How many people are going to say sure? And what price point? Hey, do you want this card for 100 bucks? Hey, do you want this card for 50, 20, 10, 0? Do you want it for free? How many people don't want it for free? If you want, go the other way. Hey, I got this sweet card with Messi and Ronaldo on it. There's only 149 of them made. There's only six of them that are in a perfect condition. Would you like this card for free? Would you like this card for 20 bucks? Would you like this, etc.? Right? So that's kind of how I think about demand and how the volume of people makes up demand and makes up that bidding system. It's all built by supply and demand. So let's go back to the spreadsheet a little bit now that I've talked about why I don't think this is a bubble, why I think we're just getting started, and why these evaluations and why these values have a lot of room to run. So we talked about the messy silver that's running. We talked about the red matchups that already ran. Here's another data point that we already have. The messy blue prism went for$24,700 on eBay. That was what, a couple weeks ago? September 8th. So it was very exciting when that all went down because that was one of the first big dominoes. Let's look at the messy blues and let's see how that tracks. So messy blue, we got right here. The highest that we have was$17.4.$17.4 versus$24K that just happened. All right. Now the pop is consistent, which is always nice. So when that happened in February of 2022, the 17,400 sale, we had a pop of six. When this sale happened in September, we had a pop of six. So apples to apples, this thing just went for$7,000 more, which is a solid 40% or so. So we're up 40% on all the highs just for Messi. If Messi's demand is consistent, you could take all of these highs that you see here, you could equate them to where they were in our soccer equalizer, if you want to make sure that, you know, the February of 2021 versus the August of 2020, where that shakes out too. And then you can find out what all of these should be worth. Now, that's one data point. I already told you the red matchups data point, which shows that it's also leaking into the high-end matchups. So back to the whole point of where this video came from. Mostly Soccer Cards says, why isn't it happening in the lower end stuff, unnumbered stuff, going to go for a less of a premium versus the matchups? And it's a good question. I don't know the answer fully. But what I will say is demand is starting at the top and it filters down. Because as human beings, we wait for indicators, we wait for signals, we wait for safety. We want to take a little risk, but not too much. And everyone has different risk appetites as well. So if you've been waiting on the sidelines and you've been watching all of this stuff happen and you've been thinking to yourself, I should do this, I should do that. And then sometimes you're excited about it, but then you get tempered in your expectations. Look, I'm not going to tell you to take risks that are irresponsible. Always be responsible. But if you have an investment thesis and you say, I think these cards are undervalued for the demand that there is out there. When people say sleeping giant, this is a sport with three billion fans in the world. The reason that the soccer card market has not blown up before this is very simple. The entirety of the market is made up of the US, Japan, and Australia. Those countries have been focused on basketball, football, baseball. That's it. Each of those sports is a big Olympic swimming pool. All of those markets grew. Those swimming pools did not start out as Olympic-sized swimming pools. They were tiny little kiddie pools where kids would pee in them. That's where they were at first. Baseball didn't really take off until the 80s in terms of the card production. As we know, that resulted in the junk wax era. Same thing for basketball, except for basketball, then trailed a little bit into the 90s, and then that took off. And then football got really popular in the 2000s. Well, guess what started up in the 2010s? That's where a lot of these cards started going. B14 was when we had the first prism set. 17 is when we had topped scrome come in for soccer. I mean, 19 is when we had topps chrome sapphire start for soccer. It's all following the same path of maturation. And why is it now? Why is this different? Why are the US, Japan, and Australia going to treat it differently this time? Because there's no other sports going on during the World Cup. And because the World Cup is in the backyard of 52% of the market next year. And one more thing about that, everyone calls it a bubble because volume is spiking and going crazy. Look at the volume on the card letter chart that I have for you here. Just a massive spike up to 66K. I mean, we were trending through more like 20K, 18K. Okay, then we started getting some movement here. We started getting some fun. And then everything all came together and went parabolic. So the volume went up six, seven X. And what I keep telling everyone is it's so the volume went up six or seven X. And again, it's a little kiddie pool that is soccer. I showed you guys some of those pops, right? Six, three. Sometimes you'll get 10. Ooh, double digits. Like compare that to some of the Brady comps, the Mahomes comps, and things like that. And this is a player that's universally loved. Messi is adored. So it starts up at the top. You start seeing those 71 bis sales that are EK, and then they're like 700K, and then they're a million, and then they're 1.5, and everyone's like, whoa. It's because those people, the whales that are buying those cards, have a singular focus. They're like, I see this as happening. Then they ask themselves, am I going to do something about this or not? And they do some research and then they decide, I see these tailwinds because of this, this, and this reason, I'm going to purchase this card. Then they begin that process. They do it very deliberately, they get it done. You see the sale. People have been talking about the soccer card market blowing up for a long time. Many people didn't do much about it. Why? Because unlike the whales, we get distracted. And those distractions pop up. And every once in a while that idea pops back into our mind. But it gets fainter and fainter the more we let distractions push it out. So a little bit of a wake-up call, guys. If you have these ideas early, do what a whale would do. Have the idea, formulate your thought and your investment thesis around it, then decide what actions you're going to take, what concrete actions you're going to take, what you can afford through your budget, find what are the best manifestations of that, right? Because there's a million cards. So how do I choose which ones? It's a theme for another podcast, but you need to create that thesis and that play that you're going to make if you want to take real concrete action. And I encourage you all to do so. To recap, because I've thrown a lot at you guys, I know this is long form. I try and break it up as much as possible, but at the end of the day, I'm just throwing this all out at you guys and hopefully we can digest it slowly together. We're seeing indicators that show us that the soccer market is well beyond where it was in the height of COVID. And that's because we have positive tailwinds happening focused into the soccer industry for the first time. America coming online for this is not something that should be treated lightly. There is expected to be$1 trillion of outside investment coming in for the World Cup for local economies at the stadiums. Wherever you want to take that advice and wherever you want to take those thoughts and bring them into your practical life is up to you. Whether you think matchups is going to be an amazing grail for the rest of our days and the fact that there are three silvers is relevant to you, cool. If you think it's messy, messy all day. If you think it's Ronaldo because his valuation became decoupled from Messi's in 2022, and you think Ronaldo could come back, what at Portugal wins the World Cup, then go Ronaldo. But look into these things, look at the numbers and figure out what doesn't make sense, what the market hasn't woken up to. Because we are going to filter down from the whales into just the flippers and into just the regular old Joes like us. So this is all going to filter down, and all of those smaller cards are going to get bumps, especially in the ones that we've already seen the whales do. Because humans like to follow what other humans do. Somebody tell me what to do, for God's sake. So I'm telling you that it is happening at the top, and people are going to now follow suit. The dominoes start falling and all of them start going. Does that mean that your Vincent company base card is going to go up? No. But it means that markets that have already shown long-term value and to be undervalued are ones that are good investment starts. Now, this isn't investment advice. Of course, you have to do your own research, but I want to give you guys these tools and resources in order to make it easier for you. I've done the work. I want to share it with you. So go to slabnomics.com, join the wait list if you're not already there. I'm going to start putting this stuff into a website so that you guys can go and frequently look at it. But go to slabnomics.com, sign up for it there, go to your email and confirm the subscription. And then when I get that site online, you'll be one of the first people to start getting these resources. This isn't just soccer for Slabnomics. This is going to be every sport. How do we compare and contrast against these different sports so that when the markets change, we're prepared to invest in the best possible avenues. So thanks so much for coming out for this special episode of Slabnomics. I hope you found this stuff useful. Make sure to like and subscribe so that you don't miss any of my surprise drops in the future. And then hit Slabnomics.com and join that wait list. Thanks for being here today. Keep building, and I will talk to you later.