Sports Enter the 'Fragmented Finance' Era as FIFA and NBA Drive the Collectible Card Markets

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Xingqiu Xiao Hua

As the World Cup approaches, while prediction markets are gearing up, another industry is quietly heating up.

Recently, FIFA announced a new rule: all players participating in the World Cup for the first time must wear a “Debut Patch” on their jerseys. This means that even globally renowned superstar players who have never previously set foot on a World Cup stage—such as Erling Haaland or Lamine Yamal—must wear this special emblem. Some national teams returning to the World Cup after many years are also required to have the entire team wear it.

This isn’t just about adding some “ritual” for World Cup newcomers—anyone familiar with the player card industry knows this patch will be removed after the match, authenticated, cut, and embedded into a player card. In the end, it could become a 1/1 rookie autographed card, graded, auctioned, and traded, with its value potentially surpassing that of a supercar in the future.

This past May, FIFA announced a long-term exclusive collectibles licensing partnership with Fanatics. Future World Cup-related player cards, stickers, and collectibles will officially enter the Fanatics/Topps era.

You may not collect basketball cards, but what’s noteworthy is that behind these small cards lies an alternative asset world worth over $10 billion, with a robust secondary market and long-term bull and bear cycles.

At the same time, the entire sports world is entering a new era of “fragmented finance.”

Former fans cared about "the historic moment witnessed by a jersey"; now, people may care more about "how many historic moments this jersey can be divided into."

After all, a single jersey can be associated with dozens of cards, hundreds of buyers, and can be resold countless times in the future, potentially forming a price curve that steadily rises or experiences significant fluctuations.

A piece of fabric may enter a card factory through a player’s chest, then proceed to a blind box, followed by a grading agency, then an auction house, and ultimately become an alternative asset in an investment portfolio.

Football player cards are nothing new. Since the 1970 World Cup, Panini has already established a system of World Cup stickers and player cards. For many fans, their childhood began with a World Cup sticker album.

However, it has never established a mature, highly liquid "sports financial asset system" like the NBA.

Those unfamiliar with this might find it strange: although soccer has the largest global fan base and its superstars carry extremely high commercial value, the prices, liquidity, and depth of the secondary market for soccer cards have long lagged behind those of NBA cards.

The reason is that the NBA is inherently more suited to assetization, while football lacks the highly unified, continuously emotion- and scarcity-driven business model that the NBA has.

Basketball is a sport steeped in individual heroism, where superstars seal victories, statistics are standardized, league narratives are unified, and the American entertainment industry excels at creating stars. From draft night and debut performances to the All-Star Game, MVP awards, playoffs, and championships, every milestone can be packaged as an asset.

The football world is too fragmented. National teams, leagues, clubs, the Champions League, sponsors, and licensing systems are all disconnected, making it difficult to form a unified and sustained financial narrative like the NBA's.

It’s easy to understand that the World Cup patch mentioned at the beginning is FIFA’s proactive effort to create “financial raw materials” for future high-value player cards.

Many in the crypto space may have first heard of Planet Cards during the NFT boom, but the market for NBA player cards has been trading for over 70 years.

In 1948, Bowman released the first NBA player cards; in 1986, Fleer introduced the Michael Jordan rookie card that would transform the entire industry; in the 1990s, fueled by the Jordan era and the NBA’s global expansion, the sports card market entered its first wave of mass hysteria, with cards being sold in nearly every mall, convenience store, and toy shop across America.

But soon, the industry entered its first major crash.

In the late 1990s, numerous issuers massively overproduced, leading to uncontrolled card printing and a prolonged bear market. This period later became known among collectors as the "Junk Wax Era."

What transformed the industry was the "scarcity revolution" after 2000.

In 2003, LeBron James entered the NBA. That same year, Upper Deck launched the Exquisite series, fully introducing concepts such as autographs, jersey patches, limited numbering, and 1/1s to the premium card market.

Since then, sports cards have become an alternative financial asset.

It has developed clearly numbered editions, scarcity tiers, long-term price curves, a rating system, an auction platform, professional market makers, and a large secondary market.

During the pandemic, grading agencies such as PSA and BGS rose in prominence, auction platforms like eBay, Goldin, and PWCC matured, and breakers began live-streaming card openings, leading to the formation of a comprehensive industry ecosystem.

The size of this market far exceeds imagination. According to 2025 data, the global sports trading card market has reached approximately $11.5 billion, with basketball cards remaining the most profitable core category in the industry, while autographed cards and patch cards are the fastest-growing premium assets.

At the same time, rating agencies have even become true "platform businesses."

In 2025, Collectors, the parent company of PSA, completed its acquisition of Beckett (the parent company of BGS), as the industry continues to move toward greater financialization and consolidation.

Over the past few years, grading companies have essentially become the "asset issuance layer" of crypto; PSA's annual revenue in 2024 exceeded $300 million. In today's sports card market, whether a piece of paper can go from $500 to $5,000 often depends solely on whether it ends up sealed in a PSA plastic case.

In addition, numerous offline "exchanges" dedicated to sports cards have emerged globally. CardsHQ in Atlanta, Georgia, has been dubbed by many media outlets as the "world's largest sports card store." It is not just a retailer—it is a large financial entertainment hub that integrates live unboxing, auctions, KOLs, community engagement, and trading.

Today's NBA star card market is actually very close to the Crypto world.

It has stood the test of time, with long-term bull and bear cycles, substantial secondary liquidity, long-term holders with “diamond hands,” KOL pump calls, and emotional trading fueled by bets on its future as the GOAT.

Many basketball card break communities operate like meme communities, with streamers driving trends, communities issuing buy signals, gambling on rookies,炒作 scarcity narratives, and FOMO-driven box openings…

To give this market sustained liquidity and the ability to be financialized, just like other assets, it requires a “narrative.”

In June last year, a 2024 Topps Now Paris Olympics 1/1 signed card of Stephen Curry sold for $518,500 at Goldin Auctions.

This card is valuable because it captures a moment: the 2024 Paris Olympics men’s basketball final, where Curry hit back-to-back clutch three-pointers and made his iconic “night-night” gesture toward France.

So the price of a card is deeply tied to the “narrative moment” behind it—the clip, the game, the cheer, the emotion of “I witnessed history firsthand.”

However, this price is not excessive in the top-tier basketball card market; in 2021, Curry’s Rookie Logoman Autograph 1/1 sold for $5.9 million.

This is the most profound change in the sports collectibles market over the past few years: prices are no longer tied solely to age or scarcity, but are defined by different “story-driven hype.”

This follows the same fundamental logic as the popular prediction markets, where on Polymarket we trade outcomes such as whether Trump will be elected, whether Bitcoin will reach a new all-time high, or whether a certain movie will win an Oscar.

In the sports card market, they trade on whether Yarmal will become the next king of football, whether Haaland will win the World Cup, or whether a certain rookie will become the future GOAT.

Prediction markets sell "probability of outcomes," while player cards sell "historical ownership"—both essentially involve preemptive pricing of collective sentiment.

Crypto traders who have been hurt by NFTs may find this "emotions into assets" chain very familiar.

But all NFT projects face the same unsolvable problem: the inability to continuously produce "new stories."

A small image may become popular for a while after minting, but once the hype fades, the project team can only struggle to maintain market consensus by continuously introducing new roadmaps, new airdrops, new collaborations, and new utilities.

After an infinite loop, only new projects can be launched until no one is left to take them over.

But sports are different—they are the world’s ever-running “emotion-production machine.”

It updates its storyline automatically every day and never ends. Someone makes a last-minute winner, someone gets injured, someone seeks revenge, someone retires, someone becomes a legend overnight, and someone rises from the bench to stardom.

Its narrative is not fabricated by the project team, but rather continuously unfolding in the real world.

I’ve always loved watching UFC—Dana White has been one of the most savvy sports operators in leveraging attention finance over the past decade.

UFC doesn't sell tickets to fight matches; it sells rivalries, trash talk, revenge narratives, underdog triumphs, and the fall of dynasties—ever-evolving emotions and dramatic stories.

People won't pay for "technical statistics," but they will always pay for "narratives."

In fact, the NBA has been the same over the years.

On one hand, longtime fans continually complain that the league is becoming too “entertaining,” with controversial officiating, star players teaming up, drama, league-promoted narratives, and an increasingly scripted feel. On the other hand, it’s undeniable that the NBA’s reach and commercial value among younger audiences are growing stronger.

Today, the consumption logic of sports, and indeed the entire entertainment industry, has changed.

Many young people may not watch entire games, but they do watch trash talk, memes, edited clips on short-video platforms, player personas, social media drama, and post-game interviews.

Sports are increasingly becoming a never-ending large-scale reality show IP, and player cards have become the most direct financial outlet for these emotions.

During the NFT bull market, projects once loudly proclaimed that Web3 would redefine sports collectibles. But now, it’s the traditional sports leagues that have率先 achieved “assetization,” because they possess what Web3 lacks: real people, real games, and genuine collective emotional consensus.

In today’s world, where everything is being financialized, sports is not only an eternal engine for creating "future history," but is also becoming a platform for issuing financial assets.