The Pokemon Pullback and Putrid Pulisic Performance (World Cup)

The hobby is loud. Buzz, hype, panic...and it all sounds the same until you learn which frequencies matter.

Fresh off Fanatics Fest and headed to The National in Chicago, Matt breaks down what he saw on the floor and what it says about where the sports card and tcg markets are going. 

Then it's into listener questions: does soccer rebound? Matt walks through:

• The full World Cup cycle,
• why he was wrong on Pulisic, 
• why you sell before the tournament and not during, 
• and why he's still long-term bullish on soccer cards with the World Cup hosted stateside.

Finally, Pokémon. The index has been up 27 straight weeks even while headline cards pulled back 40%. New collectors are shook. Veterans aren't. A pullback is not a crash and Matt explains how to tell the difference.

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Transcript

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In the world of the hobby, there's a lot of noise. We can refer to that noise in many different ways. There's words like buzz or like hype, and there's words like ear splitting or cacophonous. Noise is unavoidable, but the right type of noise is good noise. And these are the frequencies that we want to tune into. This episode of Slabnomics, I'm going to talk a little bit about the noise that I'm hearing out there, specifically from Fanatics Fest, which I just got back from, and going into the national, which I'm about to travel to in Chicago. Along the way, I'm also going to talk a little bit about what you guys have asked me to talk about in your user comments on Instagram, which is primarily around how I feel the soccer market is going to rebound, if it will rebound. And I'll tie in a little bit about TCG because I'm seeing a lot of people start talking about that. By the end of this video, I hope you have sharpened your ear to see which noise is the good noise and to be able to tune out a little bit of the bad. So speaking first about my experience over at Fanatics Fest, I want to say so amazing. The word that really comes to mind is experience. Fanatics Fest is not a card show, it is not an exhibit hall, it is not a meet and greet with athletes, it is an experience of sports and how sports touches people's lives and the ways in which we are able to participate in them as fans and as viewers. And I think that's what Fanatics got so so right. It can be a little bit discombobulating walking around Fanatics, trying to find out where you're trying to get to and hitting up against an athlete walkway all the time. But I think there's something for everybody at Fanatics Fest, and it is truly unlike any other thing that I've been to. First of all, it was in a 3.3 million square foot convention center, so you know it was crazy right off the bat. I walked around to almost every single table that was out there at Fanatics Fest, and I would say a solid 7 out of 10 of them had Pokemon cards at them. So just keeping score with you guys at home there, that means that 70% of Fanatics Fest was carrying not tops or even Panini, but carrying Pokemon cards on their tables. Truly mind-boggling how strong that market is. As far as the athletes going up and speaking on the stages, I found it to be extremely approachable. You could go there where the athlete was going to be, and you could be pretty close to Tom Brady as he's there signing cards and throwing them out into the crowd. He even chucked out a bunch of packs for people to open, and then he got a picture with the person that got the biggest hit and signed the card for them. Pretty cool stuff. Wemby made an appearance at that same stage, John Cena came and gave a talk. And I'm sure, as you know by now, Tom Brady smacked Logan Paul. It was just fun to see the fervor, the excitement around all of these events taking place and just kind of walk around in it. I love that stuff. Also, shout out some of the Slabnomics people that I was able to meet up with over at Fanatics Fest. It took some doing sometimes to coordinate and find us in the same place, but it was a real treat being able to talk with like-minded individuals on the floor in person. One thing I do want to bring up that was a little bit of a change from my expectations, the EQL being able to go up and get the sealed products that was Fanatics Fest exclusive. I found that process to be a little bit tedious, and honestly, I wouldn't do it again just because I found that the product wasn't near as exclusive as it used to be. So from a reseller's standpoint, you really weren't able to sell it. Honestly, I'm probably gonna rip it. All in all, I think what stood out to me most about Fanatics Fest was just how well planned it was and how much of a true experience it was for a fan of any sport. And I could see how much enthusiasm everyone had. So that's the backward looking stuff. Going into the national this week, I'm going to be vending over at Soko, which is the soccer only expo. Hopefully I'm gonna see a bunch of you guys over there. Shout out all my soccer peeps, but I will be walking the floor of the national a little bit here and there as well. At this point, I'm knee deep in a special play that I've been doing a lot of researching in and putting a lot of money into, so I probably don't want to buy too much at the national, but you know I'm gonna come back buying things from the national. Who are we kidding? I think my favorite thing about the national, now that I was able to go last year, is truly that you can find anything at the national. And if you're a hunter like me, you can spend hours and hours simply hunting through the tables. The cool thing is it can be as nuanced as you want it to be. If I want to find a 2016 Pokemon Center Japanese Rayquaza and cracked ice that's in a PSA 7, I'm sure I can find it out there at a table. The second thing I love about the national is if you know what to look for, you are going to find the most amazing stuff out there. All the content pieces that you've seen where people are talking about ways that you can profit in the hobby are relevant to the national. If you're going to try and raw and grade, there's gonna be raw there. If you want to try crack and cross, you're gonna find plenty of people that bought a slab and never tried to cross it. If you want to do straight up arbitrage and buy from one table and go sell it to one two tables down for a small profit and just keep flipping up, you can do that. You can do that all day at the national. That last one is honestly what I might do this one, since I don't want to just buy a bunch of products and come back with it. I think it would truly be fun to just try and trade up, flip up however you want to look at it that way, and see what we have at the end. Maybe you'll see some slabnomics content on that in the future. As far as the Soko Expo goes, if you haven't checked out the soccer only expo, if you're getting into soccer cards, or maybe you just really love the World Cup, let me extend an invitation personally to you to come to Soko Expo and see what it's all about. This is going to be the most tight-knit group of people, the best community that I've ever been involved with, and you're gonna get to walk around and talk to all of them. It's not gonna be crazy like the national where you just feel like you're lost most of the time. You're going to actually be able to have conversations with people who are very passionate about what they're doing when you talk to the vendors there. I'll be set up, I'll actually be selling both Pokemon and soccer cards this year. So definitely stop by and say hi. It is a little bit out of the way, but I can tell you it's very much worth it to go and just feel the excitement that's still buzzing around because of the World Cup. And some of the cards that you can see there are cards that you probably can't see anywhere else. I remember last year when I went, there were some opportunities that presented themselves, which I still talk about on podcasts to this day. And I fully expect that that's going to be happening again. The reason why I think that's going to be happening again is because of where we are in the soccer card market cycle now. See, I know a lot of you have been following along with me as I've been speaking about the opportunity that existed within the soccer card part of the hobby. The World Cup demand spike was coming. We all knew it was coming, so it was a matter of who got in when and when they got out. It was simply a timing window play. Finding out about this, diving into all the different sets in the history is something that I truly enjoyed in my soccer card learning and something I still do to this day. And along the way, I really developed a soft spot in my heart for the soccer cards. There's just so much raw emotion that surrounds the matches when you watch them, and you can feel that when you start looking at these cards and watching people as they look at these cards. People that have been fans of this for many, many years, that have jumped through a lot of hoops when it wasn't as easy to watch soccer matches over here in America, and who started collecting cards back before it was cool. And these diehards of the soccer card hobby are of course not in any way affected by small fluctuations in the soccer card market that are happening. They've been through it before, they've seen it. And these fluctuations are what are shaking some of the newer entrants into soccer. If you started along the path last July, so one year before, you saw a massive run-up in La Mignon first, messy as well, trickling into Ronaldo. Going into 2026, when we got to about February or so, that's when we started seeing this move into Holland and then Mbappe following that. So it really started at the top and then moved downwards. Now, one of the things I was most wrong about was Christian Polisic making a big splash in terms of his card market. While the market remained very steady for Christian Polisic throughout this year and a half, there were no real spikes because honestly, he looked very, very bad in terms of his form for pretty much the past seven, eight months. He started off hot at AC Milan, was looking like one of the best players in Serie A, and then went into this crazy cold streak where he stopped scoring any goals and everyone started questioning who he was on the pitch. His coach had to come out and defend him. And honestly, Christian Polisic, to my eyes, hate to say it, just looked really beta. At that point, I probably should have taken that hint. And this is something that we can all really key in on. Christian Polisic showed us who he was at that point. When there wasn't a lot of pressure on him, he was able to go out and perform at the highest level. It seems like that's where he's having fun and where he's able to perform based off of how much fun he's having. However, when expectations start getting higher and higher, whether it was at AC Milan in the second half of the season, when his name started getting bandied about a lot more, or when the World Cup lead up came and when he started playing group stages and the knockout, Christian Polisic showed that he doesn't have the clutch gene. He isn't able to step up into his moment. He was supposed to be the focal point of US soccer, and he honestly melted in front of the cameras. He was who we thought he was if we were paying attention back in November and December. So that one's on me, and that's something that we can all learn from this one. I definitely paid for that price in my wallet. Now, a few weeks before the World Cup, I started telling everyone in the pod, hey, this thing's run its course. It's time to get out now. Because you don't sell during the World Cup. You sell before the World Cup. And this is something I tried to make very clear to all of my listeners for Slapnomics. This approach was very correct for all but about two players. And both of these players, during the beginning of the World Cup, did have their markets going down with the rest of soccer players. But when Lionel Messi started scoring almost at will during the group stages, and when Erling Holland became an international meme, their card markets definitely got some gas. Now both of these, of course, have dipped after the World Cup. They're no longer in the public eye, but they're still going to remain elevated. And this is a key concept, I think, to understand as well. Sometimes you'll have markets ratchet up. And we try and think of things in terms of a rise and then a fall. But sometimes they just go up and then go down a little bit and then level off at a higher level. And when you have superstars that really haven't had a liquid market, especially Erling Holland, if we want to use that example, the increased attention and awareness that's been brought to him, not just among men who didn't really follow soccer, but also among women who love the memes and tend to share that stuff more than we do, it can cause massive network effects. And I think that's going to have lasting implications for Erling Holland's market. The height that we felt during this time is something we will always look back on. It's a nostalgia trigger that we're constantly going to come back to. So I think soccer did what I thought it would do. It bumped up for a long time, it went crazy when everyone started coming in trying to get the case hits. It leveled off, dipped down a little bit. Then once we got into the World Cup, people started to sell off. One really interesting thing I saw while going through Instagram, I don't remember who it was, so apologies about this, but someone was very upset about how Golden had their auctions laid out, said all the soccer was at the same time and things were selling for pennies on the dollar. This is exactly the fear that I had for the World Cup soccer market. Everyone thought that this was the trigger point. All the supply is thrown up on market at the same time, and demand at the same time is waning because the soccer card collectors are still active, but the flippers and the scalpers, those guys who usually provide some liquidity during that time, are not buying. So a massive rise of supply and you have kind of a waning demand sets you up with the worst recipe for trying to sell cards. Anybody trying to sell cards during the World Cup en masse got absolutely leveled. But now that we've shaken all that off, where are we and where's the future of soccer cards? I've always been a big proponent since the beginning of this channel in soccer cards as an industry that's nascent, that's emerging into the space of being recognized as a major sport. I firmly believe that having the World Cup here in the United States is going to have lasting positive implications on the growth trajectory of soccer carts. The soccer market itself was always massive as the biggest sport in the world, but the soccer card market was always lagging because it's here in the United States. I think some of the US guys got a little taste for soccer during this time period. Maybe not all at once, probably not going to be their favorite over baseball, basketball, or football if that's what they were into before. But they got a little taste, they got a little bit more comfortable with it. And maybe some of the things really caught their eye. In the future, when we get into another cycle, more and more people are going to be more familiar and more comfortable to come back to it. That's how the markets really grow, a step at a time. And honestly, during this time period, we're going to be helped by that because the 2026 Prism set was awesome. If you were buying the national landmarks when they first came out on the public markets, I'm sorry. I did a little bit of it as well. I could not help myself, but I have always said do not buy cards when they first come out. I have definitely paid a lot more for some cards for those national landmarks, especially, which I love, than I should have. But for me, I was buying cards that I think long term are going to be really good. For me, national landmarks, those are two Erling Holland cards and then La Migna Mole. This was the first World Cup for both of them. So having the national landmarks for both of them for the first time in their first World Cup, I think is going to be a massive boon over a long-term trajectory, even if there are a lot of these national landmarks coming to market. Side note on that, guys, remember that Panini is kind of dying. So these national landmarks, these kabooms, these mangas, they're not really going to be around anymore pretty soon. So if you find the right ones and you're able to hold those for a long period of time, especially like a gold landmarks, a gold kaboom of these kind of players, I know they're pricey, but if you can sell off a bunch of cards and consolidate into one of those, those I think are going to be great long-term holds for key players. And those players are going to continue to build the market. I think we're really going to see soccer continue to pick back up. Now that all the World Cup stuff has shaken out, we know how that all went. I think honestly soccer is already rebounding a little bit from the lows. So long term, I'm bullish. Speaking of bullish, my favorite Pokemon from Gen 1 was Tauros, who was absolutely incredible in that gen if you ever played him. And I've been getting into Pokemon a little bit more recently. If you've followed with the comp newsletter, I'm always giving you guys what the different sub industries or card industries have produced over the last week so that you can follow along and see if they're up, if they're down, what the general trends have been. If you're not on comp right now, it's free. So go to slabnomics.com, find where I have my comp newsletter, put in your email, I'll get you on the list. But one thing that I felt like a broken record on is saying that Pokemon is up again this week. In fact, it's been up for 27 straight weeks. Now, of course, this is just an index of all the Pokemon cards. I think there's over a thousand in that one. We're using card ladder for that index, by the way. So, anyways, the Pokemon index as a whole, if you take the average of all of those cards, has been going up on a weekly basis. Even over the past month, month and a half, when it seems like there's been a lot of fear in the Pokemon market. A lot of the big cards that have come out over the past year or two have started actually going down. I know. Sometimes Pokemon cards go down, guys, crazy, right? Everybody started freaking out. When I was at Fanatics Fest and I was walking around, I was talking to the vendors, the Pokemon guys, asking them, hey, how long you've been the hobby? They would tell me six months sometimes, they would tell me six years sometimes. If it had only been six months, I would ask them, hey, how are you feeling about the Pokemon market right now? And a lot of times they'd start talking about how afraid they were of some of the price motions they've seen. On the flip side, the guys that have been in for three, four, five years, they'd seen this before. So they were very unworried and they're very confident in the market. But these new guys are shook. They're seeing some of the big cards, like that Mega Gengar X sir, go down something like 40% over a few weeks. And now sports guys, we might be able to shake that off, but these Pokemon guys had never seen this before and they thought it only went up all the time. The reason I'm bringing this up to you guys is because we is because a lot of these guys are newcomers who have only seen it gone up. So for it to go down scares the bejesus out of them. I mean, after all, we fear what we don't understand. What I saw this movement in some Pokemon cards though as was a healthy pullback from a market that was being propped up by a lot of scalpers and a lot of what I see as an unethical control of supply. When people are intercepting the supply, whether it's pallets at Costco or Target, or just knowing people that sell things there and having them put aside all the boxes for them, breaking a case, getting the hit, and then sending out all the boxes that don't have the hit in them, weighing the packs and only sending out light ones to the vast majority of people. These are things that affect the people that actually want to collect and have these cards for their own enjoyment. And I think that's catching up to Pokemon a little bit. At the end of the day, cards are for the enjoyment of everybody. They're for everyone to enjoy whatever things that they give them, whether it's a nostalgia window, something that reminds them of a piece of what they want to be or are, a team that they love, or just the ability to complete something and feel satisfied with that. At the end of the day, it's not always about money. So I always see pullbacks as healthy. And the main point with this, guys, is that a pullback does not equal a crash. And the way that I know that the past month or so in Pokemon hasn't been a crash is because the Pokemon index has continued to go up every week, even during that month where things were headed down in those specific cards. If you're following indexes, if you're really tuned into the market and you're taking the big picture approach with things, you're not getting worried that one, two, three, four cards are going down. Especially when those cards are oversupplied and they went out to grading and all of them are coming back from grading at the same time. It makes sense. And if you listen to Slabnomics, you probably knew it made sense. So to all my Pokemon guys out there, be not afraid. The market should be coming back just fine. Famous last words for when it does crash and then all y'all yell at me. But this is what I'm seeing in terms of the actual market. For some reason, even though Pokemon has gone absolutely crazy, it's still pretty healthy by most indicators that I'm looking at for it. There's a lot of sports that are actually much less healthy in terms of what I see. Football, American football actually being one of those. Alright, so this is my long-winded podcast for you guys today. We dealt a little bit about what I saw at Fanatics Fest, the good things that I saw with how experience oriented it was, what I'm excited about to go hunt over at the National, as well as seeing you guys at Soko, and then transition into a little bit about talking about where the soccer card market has been, where I think it's going, as well as how the Pokemon market, which has had some news for finally going down for once, and what I think about that. Definitely send this off to a friend who's worried about the Pokemon or the soccer card market. Give them a little bit of reassurance. We all need a helping friend. And I hope to see you guys this week. As always, thank you for being here. Keep building, and I will talk to you later.