Hey, looks like your buddy J.R. Fickle here has caught World Cup fever. And the only cure is a wild-but-probably-correct hot take.
Buckle up! The meat of this hot take is: if I were going to rank which sport is the best to invest in (long term), I would take soccer over every other sport. And the worst of these sports to invest in is 100% the NFL. Spicy!
The premise being that yes it has a massive global appeal, and it has a low barrier to entry to play and generally even to collect, but also every four years it has a Super Bowl on steroids massive global event that the whole globe pays attention to.
Imagine, according to a simple Google search (aka “trust me, bro”) the average secondary-market ticket to the Group Stage of the World Cup this year was $625 per ticket. Buying 4 of those tickets costs you $2,400+ just to get in the stadium.
It’s an experience of a lifetime, no doubt. You got to see Kylian Mbappe score a few goals - the atmosphere was thrilling. Now, what if I told you that you could get a PSA 10 of an Mbappe Topps Chrome rookie card for under $500? The experience and the “investment” aren’t on a level playing field. You’re looking at paying 16% of the experience value.
Now, think about what it would cost you to see Josh Allen play in a first round playoff game - according to Google you could have gotten in to see him play in the first round of the playoffs for like $200 (give or take) per ticket. That’s an $800 investment to “get in.”
Looking at his base Optic rookie card you are paying around $600-$650 for a PSA 10. That’s around 75% of the experience value. I feel like if you can get around 40-50% in Experience Value then it’s a pretty good investment - you don’t want to get too low because then you’re in scrub territory.
“Look at you making up some weird Experience Value percentage, J.R.” Please, call me J, my father was J.R.
Ok, so how would I rank all the major professional sports?
Soccer because of, well, read above
NBA and WNBA and the generational run of young talent in both leagues
MLB because of Shohei and the trickle-down influence he has on the game (ask the non-baseball fan in your life if they know who Dalton Rushing is – bet they do now)
NHL is also on a generational run of young talent and the barrier to entry to collect ($$) is low
Men’s tennis has Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic - this is Kobe passing the torch to LeBron kinda thing; Women’s tennis has Aryna Sabalenka and top Americans like Coco Gauff, Jessica Pegula and Amanda Anisimova
NFL is here at the bottom - sorry, but it’s the absolute worst sport to invest in
Why is the NFL so low? Because Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes ruined the sport for a generation of fans. Destroyed it.
Those are the only two players I would feel confident investing in (PC aside). Think of it this way, if Josh Allen or Drake Maye or Bo Nix were to win a Super Bowl in the next few seasons, they would then only have as many Super Bowl rings as Sam Darnold.
Anyway, that’s unpacking the weird thing swirling in my brain at the moment. Let’s get to some quick hits, shall we?
Last week I went on a little journey of gassing up the Reggie Jackson “I must kill the queen” autograph inscription but, man, no one told me how awesome WWE superstar Kevin Owens was at adding inscriptions to his cards. The “These cards are weird” one is great.
I need to buy me some Kevin Owens autos.
Wait, you’re not serious about buying LaMelo Ball, are you? You can’t be serious?!
/whispers “I bought a LaMelo rookie auto immediately after the news broke.” Shh.
We did it! We bought over 46k Topps Now cards of rookie AJ Dybantsa. The card market is alive and well. And we are all poorer for it.
Not gonna lie, the America 250th Sam Eagle popcorn bucket sold at Disney is pretty great. They missed out on having the top hat open up so you can eat out of the hat instead of his… backside. Still, they are super fun.
Less appealing is the official America 250th ornament showcasing the Declaration of Independence. A couple of things - that too many words to print on a Christmas ornament.
Second, the last 6 reviews on that page all use the word “beautiful.” Another one just says “review” and another is a “narc” telling people how to report fakes being sold on other sites.
We’re 250 beautiful years into this experiment and we still suck at leaving reviews of things on the Internet.
