Greatness Without The Ring John Stockton and Karl Malone are two of the easiest players to underrate when people look back at the NBA of the 1990s. Stockton remains the great passer, the player who seemed to see every cut before it happened, while Malone became the Mailman, a scoring machine who turned the pick-and-roll … Read more
Topps wants to fight resellers. Fine. The problem is obvious. Every major release sells out in seconds, bots destroy the checkout process, breakers and professional sellers get product before normal collectors even have a chance, and sealed boxes show up immediately on the secondary market with a fat premium. That has been happening for years, … Read more
If you ask experienced collectors what makes sports cards so fascinating, very few will start by talking about money. Most remember the player first. A Mickey Mantle card reminds somebody of baseball’s golden era. A Michael Jordan rookie represents the NBA of the 1980s and 90s. Younger collectors may feel exactly the same way about … Read more
Every few weeks, another sports collectible breaks an auction record. Michael Jordan jerseys command seven-figure results, Shohei Ohtani memorabilia accelerates past traditional market ceilings, and Lionel Messi’s World Cup kits transition into museum-grade assets. These headlines suggest that sports collectibles have evolved into a highly institutionalized alternative asset class. Yet, the core driver of this … Read more
Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner may spend the next ten or fifteen years deciding who ultimately owns this generation of men’s tennis. The strange part is that collectors don’t seem interested in waiting. The market has already started leaning towards Alcaraz. High-end trading cards sell for several thousand dollars, signed cards attract strong prices almost … Read more
The tennis GOAT debate is strange because sport and market do not seem to answer it in the same way. If you look only at titles, Novak Djokovic has the strongest case. He broke the numbers, lasted longer than almost anyone expected, kept chasing records while Federer and Nadal had already become memory, and turned … Read more
Carl Lewis should be a much bigger name in memorabilia than he is. Nine Olympic gold medals, Olympic dominance across sprint and long jump, one of the defining athletes of the 1980s and early 1990s, and still you can find signed items from him at prices that feel almost absurdly low for a figure of … Read more
Lothar Matthäus belongs in almost every serious discussion about the greatest midfielders football has ever produced. That sounds like a bold statement until you actually think about what he achieved. World Cup winner, Ballon d’Or winner, the driving force behind West Germany for more than a decade and one of the few players who could … Read more
There are athletes whose careers can be explained with statistics, and then there are athletes whose careers can almost be reduced to a single image. For Boris Becker, that image is still Wimbledon in 1985. Seventeen years old, completely fearless, diving across the grass and suddenly becoming the youngest Wimbledon champion the men’s game had … Read more
One of my favourite stories in sports business has surprisingly little to do with the NFL itself. Years ago, Uli Hoeneß travelled to the United States because Bayern Munich was financially trying to reinvent itself. German soccer still thought primarily about football. The Americans were already thinking about entertainment, merchandising, stadiums and everything happening before … Read more