I Ran a 15-Month Soccer Card Fund. Here's What Actually Worked.

 A 15-month soccer card investment fund, reviewed in real time during the 2026 World Cup. Why demand trickles top-down in illiquid markets, why case hits (Kaboom, Color Blast, Stained Glass) hold a floor, and why Messi, Mbappé, and Haaland moved the market while prospects burned capital. Supply, demand, and the pre-tournament dip. 

Invest, don't gamble. 

Music licensed through Soundstripe.
Code: HZJPVCKVKAJUFFXF, UXMVRMTVRBJROCR9, BKVEPZEKUG6S4GRO, CN3FU0R0WNSQEIMP, UZQZMIMZRGSWFOJQ, 0Q5RITPLSX8TZN25, I2I8GOQBXBKD8MSC

Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com
🎥Youtube
📸Instagram

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, and welcome to Slabnomic's Happy World Cup to all who celebrate. This podcast is going to be dealing with the World Cup. This is something that I've been talking about for about a year now. And now that we're in the thick of things, I want to review what kind of market movements we've seen. There have been some surprises to the positive, surprises to the negative, and everything in between. So if you haven't been following along for Slabnomics, what we do here is we help you be a better sports card investor through buying smarter, selling smarter, grading strategies, all of the above. So buckle in and let's get down to it. One thing that my Slabnomics investor tier subscribers know is that I've been actually putting together money for the express purpose of investing in the coming World Cup. This is something that I've been doing for about 15 months or so, and that fund of investments from friends and family is money that's now going to be either liquidated and sent back to them or pushed into new ventures for the future. The idea of raising money for the fund is one that really parallels the idea of emerging markets if you look into those for stocks. Back in about 2016-2017, the idea of investing in the bricks was a huge idea for anyone perusing stock market investing strategies. The idea that globalization was going to move us towards money being invested into these high-growth yet traditionally not capitalist-friendly areas was one that gained a lot of steam. This idea closely parallels what I was thinking for the World Cup. As I've talked about before, 52% of the sports card resale market takes place here in the United States, which just so happens to be the one place that soccer is not the main sport, pretty much across the entire world. The idea that people traveling over from Europe, from Africa, from Asia, here to enjoy the World Cup would leave its mark on Americans and bring in their love of soccer, but also the possibility of Americans leaving their mark on those travelers in terms of sports card memorabilia was an exciting paradigm shifting moment in my mind. Going back to the stock market for a second, the idea of emerging markets is also powerful because these are areas that are traditionally underfunded. So when they do get funding, their growth trajectory is kind of like a small cap stock. When it first starts getting noticed, all of the money rushes in at once, and there's nobody selling at that time, so the market balloons up. That's how my expectations for the soccer fund win. We want to use capital in an emerging space that is the soccer card market and have the highest ROI over a 15-month time frame. Now, my initial idea that I had was that I would simply throw these into a broad basket of investments, as it were. Coming from a financial background, the idea of a diversified portfolio where if players with the right background got a sudden surge of interest, we would see their card value spike. I thought that that was going to be the way to go. What I came to find though is that with an illiquid market, demand really starts from the top and it trickles down. Unless there's a very specific, highly concentrated catalyst that changes the market perceptions of a player all at once, you're not really going to be seeing these demand spikes. Even if you do, it can be hard to nail down which card or set those spikes are going to move in and out of. So I found very quickly that trying to take a flyer on the hundredth ranked player in the world just in case he suddenly caught fire so that I can move in and out was not going to be the strategy for me. Neither was really prospecting for these soccer players because a lot of times they take too long to develop and they're not going to show significant enough upside to cause that spike in the market. So I knew I needed to make some moves. I sold off my losers, I found what my winners were, and I used that data to figure out how I could redistribute where my capitalization was being used. Phase one kicked off in February of 2025, and at that time I had so little knowledge of the soccer card market. I was diving down rabbit holes, learning everything I possibly could about all the sets, all the players, what was valued, what wasn't. It was a lot. At that time, I think I was putting in about 80 hours a week, and my fiance was not loving that. Phase two then started around June. So after about four months, I kind of got my feet under me and figured out what was and what wasn't working. And I also realized that if new demand was coming into the market, I needed to be able to meet that new demand and not try and treat the market as if it were behaving as the old market before. If new demand is coming in, I need to be looking at where that new demand is going to be investing their money. So phase two I call the case hit phase. My thesis was simple. The people that are going to be coming into soccer cards see that the World Cup is coming, and those people are normally going to be coming from a different sport. They're not usually going to be coming from not loving any cards at all. Now, when people come from a different thing into another thing, like say you come from playing one sport into another sport, tennis to pickleball, to use Austin analogies here, you're probably going to bring over what you had used before in that other sport. You're gonna use the swings and slices that you had in tennis, apply those to pickleball. That's what I realized I needed to focus on for these soccer cards. And people coming in from basketball and football cards, what do they love? What do they know? What are they always moving? Case hits. So I transitioned a big part of all of those phase one losers that I had to cut and take a loss on in the short term into case hits. I trimmed a little bit of my winners so I still had enough capital to move into those case hits, and then I started afresh. In terms of the player hierarchy, I definitely moved up and I stopped trying to grasp at those small hits that might hit big and get a little bit more floor and security. This point I probably had about 15 to 20 players that I had some kind of investments in, and I focus on case hits, of course, like kaboom, I like stained glass a lot, color blasts. Those were probably my main three. On the other side, I kept with what had been working, which was old school 2014 Prism, and I started moving a little bit into some 2017 Chrome. Old sets always pop off for collectors during these times. July of 2025, we started getting a lot of La Mina Mall movement, then Messi's market went to the absolute moon. Market that at this point I'd been watching for eight or nine months had been moving slowly, ratcheting up. And then all of a sudden, Messi went 3x in about three months. The market finally determined that value was there for the taking, that this didn't make sense, a lot of these valuations of Messi rookies, as well as old school rare parallels for Messi, and even case hits. I remember back then you could get a Messi National Landmarks for like $500. Now, good luck getting it less than two grand. And kabooms, man, kabooms were like a thousand, maybe two thousand dollars for the oldest ones. Those 2017 kabooms, which are the first year printed in soccer, think you could get them for like $3,000 back then. Looking back now, if I had to do it all over again, I would have just bought a bunch of 2017 messy kabooms. You buy the first kaboom, you get it in the best condition possible, buy all of them, sell them all when the time comes. But say lovey. I would say that phase two was my most consistently successful phase. The case hits have almost a guaranteed floor because there's enough of them that they're liquid and trade often, but there's also so much demand for them that they're continuously just ratcheting up little by little. That's why vendors love case hits. I think Panini really figured out their bread and butter with the case hits. They figured out what the right amount to print was to really meet the demand, but keep it from getting oversaturated. You'll see the color blast black be a lot less than the prisms, which are white color blasts. Pretty clear why this is. There's way more of those obsidian black color blasts than there are the white prism color blasts, and prism has much more demand as a set than obsidian. And the white's just clean, let's be real. So the case hits phases where things really started popping off. And at one point, I was looking at about 85% gains after fees. Now remember that the purpose of this fund is in 15 months to go ahead and make the highest ROI possible, and to do that, you can never become complacent. You always have to be thinking about what's next, but you also have to be very realistic about what's worked, what's not working, and taking your risk and your risk-adjusted rate of return. This was now about November, December time period of 2025. So about seven months ago, things were looking great. I was trying out a lot of new strategies, and some of them were working out really well. But what I've been doing on the side with Slabnomics is I've been looking a lot at the market and how it was behaving, especially how it was different from COVID. And I noticed in COVID we had a huge surge in demand for the low end of the market, and then the high end caught fire later. It was the reverse in 2025. The high end caught fire because we have new billionaires and new millionaires coming in because of AI, and then it's trickled down a little bit into the low end, but there was still so much value down the low end compared to COVID times. I reasoned that this would then trickle down into the low end and we'd start seeing an uplift of value, especially with the World Cup going on. So I decided to use some of the gains that I'd gotten from my case hit trading and put those into some low end stuff. Now, when I say low end, I'm not talking about just a paper Dunruss raw card of Messi that's three dollars. I'm talking more about like a PSA 10 base card from 2014 World Cup Prism for Messi. That's the kind of stuff that I started looking at. And I did it in a pretty disciplined way. I was looking at pretty much five players Messi, Ronaldo, Holland, Mbappe, Laminium all. I realized that people start at the top and they don't really get that far down, especially when World Cup games aren't going on, so we don't have this massive influx and spike into one little known player. Instead of trying to throw a hundred darts at a dart board that wasn't even up yet, I decided to just focus on the GOATs and the up and coming upper elite players. This was phase three. I still kept some of the case hits long term if I thought that they still had some value run for the World Cup. I still had some of my old school Prism and some Topps Chrome that I'd added because I got big into the fact that Topps was taking over the license and that that would give us some push. And I wanted to add about 15-20% of the fund's value into these PSA 10 refractors, silvers, bases for the big players. So going into the World Cup, how my allocation looked within the fund was about 40% rare classic collectors cards, 40%, and about 20% of those low-end but high grade cards for the very best players. Then the World Cup finally came. And in the run-up to the World Cup and the early days of it, something happened that I did not expect, but we'd been warned about by prior times, by the prior World Cup. Market started going down. If you look at Messi's market in particular, you'll see about a week or 10 days where the market was clearly ratcheting down. Same thing for La Migne Mall, same thing for Cristiano Ronaldo. Now, at the same time, sales volume was picking up. And I believe that this clearly shows something that we forget a lot of times. There's both demand and supply in the market. A lot of people that have been waiting for the World Cup to sell cards finally came online. And all of a sudden, if you look down fanatics, soccer cards were everywhere. Brought up the 2022 World Cup in Qatar because this event happened very similarly there, with one key difference that I'll get to in a minute. But in the month or so leading to the World Cup, as well as the time afterwards, the soccer market really just filtered down. So it looked for a second like that's what was gonna happen here at this World Cup. Then the stars went supernova. Messi came out and had a hat trick and a brace in his first two games, and Mbappe and Holland were putting in goals like it was their job. The expansion of the number of teams in the World Cup, which is new for 2026, resulted in the group stage giving more opportunities for these players to score. We also got to get amazing stories like Cabo Verde tying the number two team in Spain, nil-nil. Sound soccer playing aside, the real story was the golden boot race. The golden boot being who scores the most goals in the World Cup. In previous years, over the last 20, 30 years, a lot of times this amount would be five goals, maybe four goals, six goals was usually enough to get it for you. Messi had five goals in two games. Time of this podcast, with three games left to play, there are three players, Messi, Holland, and Mbappe, who are all at the levels right now which would have won golden boot in many of the FIFA World Cup tournaments in years past. It's a scoring bonanza, and we love it. That downward slide that we saw in a lot of the players' markets leading up to the World Cup in early days did a reverse about turn when these guys started begging goals left and right. Messi's market started popping up as people realize this guy's the unquestioned GOAT and he can score at will at the age of 39. Doesn't matter if he's playing in the MLS for a couple years before that. That World Cup Mbappe is a goal scoring machine and can do whatever he wants, and that Erling Holland is generally one of the funniest, quirkiest guys that you'll see out there. And by the way, absolute goal hound. A lot of players need to touch the ball 30, 40 times a game in order to consistently score. The guy touches it like 10 times and he bags two goals. On the more speculative prospecting side, we've seen players like Bu Audi come out and show great performances, and they have such a small rookie card market that demand is literally just one set, 2023 tops inception. So that caused those cards to spike to ridiculous levels just because he made some nice passes. And unheralded players like Vicinia from Cabo Verde have gained massive followings overnight. And I haven't checked his card market, to be honest, so maybe he's got cards out there too. I wouldn't be surprised if he actually had no cards. That country has 500,000 people totaling. On the negative side, unfortunately, La Minha Mall at this point has not shown a lot of what people really love about him. His creative flair, his ability to dribble past pretty much anybody, and bag some very nice hard goals. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like he's quite right on the pitch, and Spain itself has been a little bit off. Still, he's an incredibly popular guy. He's still popular even when he doesn't score. So though his card market dips a little bit, everybody assumes that we'll just come back. And he's still so young. He's not even 19 years old, and he's an international superstar, probably the most popular player in the world that doesn't wear a messy on the back of their shirt. Quick side note away from cards, this World Cup has been such an amazing thing to watch. Hopefully, you guys are able to grab some of the games and able to go out to places where all of the fans of these countries and teams are. I've been able to go to this bar in Austin for all the Mexico games, and they have been so incredible. So much energy, every pass, every touch, everyone shouting one way or another, and you just gotta feed off that energy. So if you haven't done that, make sure to get out and experience that. You're gonna look back and wish you did. So to wrap up what's been happening in the World Cup and how that's influenced the soccer card market here. Initially we saw a dip just like in 2022 when the World Cup was held in Qatar. A lot of people had been speculating that the new upsurge of interest around the World Cup and marketing around that would increase the soccer card market. That didn't really happen because it was in Qatar and no one really cared. So we didn't have newcomers really come in and start having any interest in the World Cup. That's different when it's been in America. So we saw the speculators start selling, but then we saw a new wave of demand come in because of this American World Cup. My hope for all of this, because I truly love the soccer card market and the community. Shout out to all y'all, is that I hope we get new people that discover soccer cards, discover a love for the game. In America, we can truly grow the sport. I think it's a really positive influence on both local communities and for us all as a whole. And we have a long way to go here. Controversy around the red card for Phalarim Belogan that was rescinded after a call from our president is going to give us a huge black eye going forward. And I think a lot of us are really unhappy about it. I think the classiest thing to do was even if Trump made that call and got that reversed, that we'd sat that striker and we played with class. You could tell that those players out there did not believe in what they were doing. They were down, they were depressed, they had no energy, they were walking around, they were leaderless. I don't think they were proud of what happened there. And they played like it. And if we had set ourselves up to be the underdogs instead of the bullies and decided that even if we could play our Star Striker to sit him because that was the right thing to do, I think you would have seen a very different American team out there. And I think the trajectory of growth for the future would be a lot higher because right now everyone just feels bad about it. Americans feel bad about it. Fans of the game from other countries hate it. It's just a bad look and not what we need when we're trying to participate in a worldwide phenomenon. So that's all about the World Cup. Make sure to tune in to the games. I'm really looking forward to Spain versus France. If we get there, please. But let me go ahead and summarize some of the learnings from my fund and from investing in the World Cup and seeing how everything played out. I'm gonna give you some do's and some don'ts really quick. First of all, having a broad portfolio of assets is the way to go if you're in stocks for long term. It is not the way to go if you're in an emerging alternative asset class like soccer cards. That's very illiquid. Second, speculating on unproven prospects in an emerging illiquid asset class is even more risky and is going to burn you probably even worse. If you're going to buy that red tops chrome out of five PSA 10 for that emerging prospect that's looked really good but hasn't really put it together, you are really putting yourself on the chopping block. That's where I made my biggest losses. Third thing, if you keep looking at something and being like, I don't understand why this price is here and you've done all the research, go with your gut. That was my thought with a lot of the 2014 Prism. Silver PSA 10s, purple PSA 10s for Messi, for Ronaldo early on. Comparing them to other players like early LeBron cards, early Brady cards, gives you a really good perspective of where the values really should be if the market is really in tune. Fourth thing here, understand where demand is coming from. You first figure out why there's going to be an influx of demand. Next, you figure out where's that demand coming from, and what are those people most likely to buy. That's how you understand where demand is going to head, not by just taking a bunch of dart throws. This was a really big lesson for me, and I hope you guys can take that one to heart too. It's very, very powerful. Skate to where the puck is going. And lesson number five, the one I want to leave you with that's most important. Invest, don't gamble. Biggest mistakes that I made through this entire process of this fund was buying cars that were a true speculation. Just on a hope and a prayer that this player could outperform. Everything is all about expectations, but when you have a hot prospect, that player's already outperformed. They've already become the hot prospect. They have to move up from hot prospect into real rising elite player to hit the next level. And that's very, very unlikely statistically. Hand in hand with this don't gamble concept. If you buy a card on auction and then think that you're just gonna auction it off two weeks later because your price was low, that's a fundamental mistake. Auctions are by nature pretty consistent. So a big learning was if you buy it at that price, that's probably what the market was willing to pay for it at that time. So selling it two weeks later when nothing has changed is a really good way to bleed out your money. This has been Slabnomic's podcast. I hope I've gone through some stuff that has made you think about cards in a little bit different way. And I also hope that I've given some of my love of the soccer card market and my newfound love of the World Cup to you guys today. If you enjoyed this video, the best thing that you can do is share it with a friend so that you guys can talk about it together. What really made you think? What was I wrong about? As always, leave it in the comments as well. Thanks so much for being here. Keep building, and I will talk to you later.