It wasn’t long ago that professional sports were amateurly run. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, sports games started to be beamed into homes around the world with the rise of cable TV, and fans didn’t need to be local anymore. Audiences became global, sponsors latched on, the money multiplied, and everything started to become a product you could collect.
Even though sports memorabilia has been around as long as sports have been played, its culture began to grow exponentially about forty years ago, when sports started to become bigger spectacles. In recent years, trading cards have returned as valuable
commodities—with the card market even outperforming the stock market. Now, sports collectibles are taking on a new digital form with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of highlights selling for tens of thousands of dollars.
This is expected to be just the beginning. But does buying more make you a better fan? Is spending really the best way to support your team? Are sports still about the memories or just about the money? Read my
article on the sports-memorabilia boom here.
