Trading cards - a highschoolers collective

Noah Lewis
2 hours ago
13 min read

The Modern Sports Card Industry: Scalpers, Breakers, Grading, and the Transition from Panini to Topps

The End of Panini’s NFL Era

With the era of Panini football trading cards coming to a close, (due to Topps taking over the license), the company has desperately pushed out some high end (high end meaning more money than usual), trading cards. These are cards like Panini Patrick Mahomes Icon Collection, which seemed like a last minute money grab. The higher end hobby boxes (boxes that guarantee autographs, memorabilia cards and numbered cards) contained various autographs of Mahomes, and had a very high price point of $15,000 per box. Many of these boxes failed to give collectors value, leading to a poor view of the release.

Most collectors see the transition to Topps as the best possible outcome, with the release of the highly anticipated Topps Chrome on April 15, 2026. While the product did sell out in minutes, one thing stood out. The hobby boxes were $400, reselling online for $1,000, with only one guaranteed autograph! With the usual amount of releases for Topps being 6 NFL products per year, and the speed at which these have sold out, the regular collectors can’t keep up.

Scalpers, Resellers and Youtubers along with some lucky regular collectors got to get their hands on the Chrome boxes, but not everybody was able to get these boxes. This led to wild prices on eBay and other selling platforms, and the $20 hanger box remains resold (excluding shipping) at a almost a 100% increase at $40 online! Granted, Panini isn't much better, but with the sheer amount of product Panini puts out, people learn to find the lowest product like Panini Certified, which is around $250, and guarantees two autographs (with a memorabilia and an autograph), two memorabilia cards, and three numbered cards. This is much more than one autograph and two numbered cards that Topps Chrome guarantees.

Topps taking over the football trading card license isn't all bad though. Two things that Panini has faced the most scrutiny for in the past is the non game used memorabilia and the reliance on rookies. Topps has introduced game-used memorabilia cards, making patch cards a lot more valuable, and giving collectors cards from their favorite players that were played in actual games. Topps also focused more on pro players, with Josh Allen, Jim Kelly, and other highly skilled players signing in the product.

Breakers

A massive problem with sports cards nowadays are breakers. Breakers are people who sell sports card boxes online in teams or just sell the boxes themselves, and open them in front of a livestream camera.

When breakers sell teams, they guarantee that they make money because if a box is $250, and is split into 32 teams for football, and if those team spots are sold at $20 each, they make $640 on the box.

When they sell the boxes themselves, they get to experience the pack opening while still not losing any money themselves. This seems somewhat honest, right? Unfortunately, these breakers are notorious for scamming and stealing cards.

Two of the most notable examples of this were:

The breakers Backyard Breaks giving away a pack of football cards that contained a 1/10 gold Trevor Lawrence card (which at the time was worth $20,000+) and stated that they "couldn't give away that one” and kept it.
Kryotics, a breaker that pulled the 1/1 Lamine Yamal rookie card valued at $50,000, and kept it, claiming it was “mis-shipped” online.

PSA

Aside from Breakers, one of the most famous frauds that still keeps getting away today is the leader of sports cards grading, PSA.

For those who don’t know, grading basically rates a card on how clean it is from 1-10, putting it into a plastic case, and shipping it back to you.

For one, grading at this company is like gambling. If someone has a bad day when grading your valuable card, you are out a lot of money. That's not even mentioning the high grading cost, and what is even worse, the “insurance” on your cards included in the grading cost.

When shipping a valuable card, PSA will ask the value of the card, and if you have pulled a million dollar card, and put the card’s worth as a million dollars, they will charge you “$250,000 or higher” just to grade the card. Even if that card ends up being like one thousand dollars, they will still charge the high grading cost.

At least at this level, they give notes on how they graded the card and what imperfections caused it to be worth less.

You might ask, why even grade a card? PSA 9-10s usually double if not triple the value of cards.

eBay

One of the most reliable and unreliable sports cards selling and buying companies is eBay. eBay has one of the best platforms for buying, selling, and bidding on sports cards, but eBay is notorious for having bad sellers.

One of the best examples of this is the fake graded cards. These budget grading companies like PTA offer graded cards at a fraction of the cost. In reality, PTA should really be BGA, for Backyard Grading Authentication. These “PTA graded cards” are just someone putting a plastic case over a card and giving them whatever grade they want, upping the value as they increase the grade.

Also, check before you buy a graded card, because some people can take authentic, PSA graded cards and open them up, without a trace. Then, they up the grade, and it still looks authentic due to the PSA graded cover.

A growing trend within the card-collecting community has become the sale and purchase of so-called “loose packs,” these packs are usually packs of random cards that originate from a variety of sets that have been grouped together for the consumer.

These packs can be from either hobby, mega or blaster boxes, and cost more depending on the pack. The chances of the cards in the pack being profitable improve depending on the pack.

There is also an added risk though, because sellers can weigh these packs. Weighing packs is a way for people to sell unopened packs without any good cards while keeping the heavier packs for themselves, as autographs and memorabilia cards tend to weigh more.

Types of Sports Card Products

Boxes of football cards

Cases

This high end product contains a “case” of about 5-20 boxes of cards. These will cost all the way from $800 to exceeding $25,000 for a case.

These cases come on average with a very expensive “case hit” which has a chance to pay for the entire case. Some cases might not even have this case hit, making high end cases a huge risk. Some cases might also have more than one case hit.

Blaster Boxes

These boxes cost around $30+ and are the low end of sports cards. You still get the chance of pulling some high end cards like case hits, but the odds are highly reduced.

These boxes are also highly recommended if you want to make money on boxes, as if you get a semi valuable card, there is a higher chance that it is worth more than the box.

Mega Boxes

These boxes usually cost around $50-70 and contain more chances at valuable cards, with some boxes even containing one memorabilia or autographed card.

Odds are slightly higher to pull some valuable cards based on blaster boxes, but still low. You can pull case hits, and have a better chance to pull good autographs and cards.

Hobby Boxes

These boxes are very high end, with boxes ranging from $250-25,000. These have the highest hit or miss ratio, with some $25,000 boxes containing less than $1,000 in cards.

These boxes are guaranteed to have autographs, numbered cards, and memorabilia cards. You can pull case hits from these boxes, and probably the highest chance of pulling good cards lies with these boxes.

Cards

These are the physical cards and autographs from the boxes, usually sold on selling platforms such as eBay or Whatnot.

With the physical cards, you are guaranteed the card, without running the risk of boxes. These cards can tend to be more expensive, like autographs of rookies such as Bo Nix going for $250 for low end autographs, all the way up to $97,000 for the 1/1s (only one in the world).

More importantly, sellers have recently tried to make cards into gambling, with the introduction of “chaser packs."

These chaser packs show a really valuable item, usually a high end autograph that is listed at a fraction of the cost. The twist is that when people buy the packs, they only have a chance of getting the card and if they don’t, generally they just get sent a couple of non valuable cards or base cards.

These chaser packs can range from $10-100, with a set amount of packs. There isn't even a guarantee that these packs contain the card, since if the seller decides to keep the valuable card, there is no way of telling.

The History of Panini, Topps, and Fanatics

As you might know, Panini America is losing their exclusive NFL license, handing it over instead to their long time rival and competitor, Topps.

Topps entered the market around the 1950s, starting out with collegiate cards, and circled to make colorful cards centered around the NFL’s best players. At first, people just wanted to collect their favorite players and wanted to eat the gum and candy that existed in the earlier trading card packs, but when they started to include autographs from the league's best players, nearly 40 years later, the trading card market really started to take off.

Around 2009, Panini saw how successful the card business was, and sought to enter the competition with their creation of brands like Score, Leaf, Classics, and their highly sought after product, Prizm.

After some time, Panini finally secured exclusive NFL rights in 2016.

The Leading Companies

Topps

Topps entered the market around the 1950s, starting out with collegiate cards, and circled to make colorful cards centered around the NFL’s best players.

At first, people just wanted to collect their favorite players and wanted to eat the gum and candy that existed in the earlier trading card packs, but when they started to include autographs from the league's best players, nearly 40 years later, the trading card market really started to take off.

Panini

Panini America started off with making and selling sports stickers, which they still attempt to do now.

In around 2009, Panini saw how successful the card business was, and sought to leave their sticker business and enter the competition with acquiring NBA licenses in 2009, followed by NFL rights in 2009–2010, and finally secured exclusive NFL rights in 2016 with their brands like Score, Leaf, Classics, and Prizm being highly sought after with collectors.

Fanatics

Fanatics is a well known business that started in 1995 as a brick and mortar sports merchandise store.

It quickly gained popularity when a digital giant called Michael Rubin bought it in 2011 and turned it into a dominating company.

Michael further kick started the business by buying Topps, sports licenses, and making various sports betting platforms.

Despite lawsuit attempts, Fanatics has held strong. Sports leagues clearly desire Fanatics as a partner, as Fanatics has obtained NBA, NBPA, MLB, MLBPA, the NFL and the NFLPA licenses.

Grading Companies

The undisputed leader of card grading is PSA.

Grading basically rates a card on how clean it is from 1-10, putting it into a plastic case, and shipping it back to you.

You would think the leading grading company, PSA would be a reputable company. But PSA is known for being one of the worst possible options for grading cards for a couple of reasons.

At least at this level, they give notes on how they graded the card and what imperfections caused it to be worth less.

You might ask, why even grade a card? PSA 9-10s usually double if not triple the value of cards. The regular card could be worth $40, and in a PSA 10, it could be worth $100+.

If receiving a bad grade on a very good conditioned card, many people “crack” or break open graded cards and resubmit them to get a higher grade.

PSA Scandal

PSA also destroyed a $45,000 card.

Recently, they have received a lot of hate, when a collector submitted a $45,000 Japanese Deoxys card that was already graded a 10, for re-holdering. (Re-holdering means PSA creates a new plastic case for the PSA card submitted and puts it into that case while retaining the grade.)

While re-holdering, PSA apparently damaged the card, making the new grade a 6/10.

This significantly decreases the value, making the $45,000 Deoxys worth half of the 45k, if not half, then even more than half.

Since PSA relies so heavily on their insurance policy, the submitter was supposed to receive the full value of their card back, but PSA being PSA, offered them only $20,000 in compensation, saying they would also have to sign an agreement that they couldn't say anything about the whole situation.

What makes this even worse is the fact that the last Deoxys sold was $45,000, BY THE PSA ACCOUNT. PSA sold this card themselves for $45,000, and only offered $20,000 in compensation.

Fake Cards and Counterfeits

Another big problem with the hobby is the appearance of fake cards.

One notable example of this is the fake Travis Kelce autographs. These cards are shipped from a real looking PSA address, and contain a QR code on the back to “check the cards authenticity.”

This scam preys on people's trust of QR codes, as the codes are usually very trustworthy, and used in everyday life.

If scanned, this QR code steals your information.

One of the people targeted in this scam, Mark Moberly, a real estate agent in the Kansas City area received a Travis Kelce counterfeit autograph.

Thankfully, Mark stopped himself before he could scan it, but said “I bet 9/10 people that get this scan it.”

This was also during the holidays season, to make the scam even more believable.

Also, PSA “slabs” or the plastic thing on graded cards, are really easy to break open without a trace. This can lead people to make fake PSA cards, with their own grades.

The Pandemic Boom

A big part of what trading cards are today came from the 2020 pandemic.

With the risk of Covid, most people were stuck at home, trying to find a hobby, and people started moving to buying trading cards.

Since so many people were buying trading cards, the card companies started trying to monopolize on the sudden boom in cards, creating the most amount of hype seen since they started.

Most people were trying to create quick profit, seeing the market soar sky-high, and cards like high end autographs of people like Patrick Mahomes suddenly became valued at millions of dollars.

Since then, these cards have rapidly decreased in popularity and now are worth only 5-50 thousand dollars, a more than 50% reduction in value.

This raised questions about the long term investment in proven pros and rookies.

Professional Players

Professional players are usually safer investments than rookies because they already have established careers.

Players who have won championships, MVP awards, or broken records are more likely to maintain value in their cards.

However, even professional players can lose value if they retire, get injured, or simply lose popularity with fans.

Rookies

Rookies are the most risky but potentially the most profitable cards in the hobby.

When a rookie player performs well early in their career, the value of their rookie cards can skyrocket very quickly.

However, if that player performs poorly, gets injured, or never becomes a star, those same cards can lose most of their value just as quickly.

Because of this, investing in rookie cards is often compared to gambling, where collectors are betting on a player’s future success.

Overproduction in the 1980s and 1990s

People usually wonder why the best rookie cards in the 1980s to the 1990s are very cheap, even for the best players.

This is due to the overproduction of these cards.

Eventually companies figured out if they numbered their cards (numbering meaning only producing the amount of cards that that card is numbered to, for example the 99 being only 99 in the world of that card).

For the purpose of investing, usually the limited edition boxes of cards are the best bet for buying and selling boxes for a profit.

One example is the famous Mickey Mantle rookie card. Due to overproduction at the time, the boxes in which people could find this card were scrapped and thrown away as a result of people just not caring for cards anymore.

Eventually, once Mickey Mantle became a star, everybody wanted the card, but the rookie card was few and far between.

This led to a graded 10 of this card going for $12.6 million in 2022.

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. Accessed 31 Mar. 2026.

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Noah Lewis is a 10th grader at the white and blue school of Poudre High School. This is his first year in Poudre Press. He is also an avid wrestler, who wrestles year round. Other hobbies he enjoys include mountain biking, collecting sports memorabilia/cards, camping, and playing video games.