One in three young people invest in trading cards
An upward trend
Not only video games, smartphones and social networks. The new generations are rediscovering a taste for a passion that can’t be more analog, card collecting. Woe to define it as a simple collection of stickers: these are cards – not stickers – dedicated to various topics – from sports to entertainment, from comics to manga – that are exchanged at values that are no match for the latest smartphone models. Among digital natives and young adults, as many as 1 in 7 è a regular buyer of this evolution of classic stickers. And, among them, more than 1 in 3 seeks to do business, buying to resell, sometimes at sky-high prices. With significant investments: the average annual expenditure is around 350 euros.
Revealing this (re)emerging trend è is a survey – conducted by the student portal Skuola.net in collaboration with Topps®, one of the reference realities in the sector – which saw the participation of 2,200 girls and boys in the age group ranging from middle school to university. Specifically, 10 percent of the sample declared themselves frequent buyers, while 5 percent went so far as to describe themselves as expert collectors. Numbers that, in the case of the male component of the sample, tend to double, while in the case of the female component they tend to halve: but this è is also news, given that some of the areas that are going for the most are precisely those of sports.
The 32% of males are mainly devoted to the collection of football-themed cards against the still significant 18% female. Next on the preference scale are NBA and American sports, collected by 13% of males and 8% of females. Both genders find practically perfect agreement on motor sports – the theme of choice for 10% of collectors – but especially on the fantasy strand where we count real cults such as Pokémon cards: here the collecting aspect mixes with the playful one and convinces as many as 60% of the genre’s devotees.
Girls, on the other hand, prefer the world of manga and comics more than boys (37% vs. 23%), as do collections pertaining to movies and TV series (22% vs. 11%). And more generally in them the passionate aspect prevails over the business one. Although business is not a majority trend-they interpret the cards as real cult objects-it should be noted that more than a third of fans (34%) buy in the hope of finding rare and valuable cards in the sachets, to be used as a future investment, reselling them at the quotations indicated by the “lists” of the secondary market at that precise moment, exactly as for any commodity category that lends itself to a buy-sell. A share that rises to 40 percent among boys and falls to 27 percent among girls.
The “search for the lost card” also brings back into vogue other analog channels that we may have given up too soon. In fact, 24 percent of young people buy sealed packages online while everyone else divides their time among the various distribution channels. In contrast, when it comes to single cards, online gains ground. However, with 51 percent of the overall market share, specialty stores and trade shows still hold out, where interested parties turn, looking for exclusive products and/or expert buying support. Targeted purchases are to be made when the pieces are still affordable, and then to dispose of them when they gain value. This also explains why “collectibles” revolve a lot of money around them. On average, card “merchants” spend 344 euros per person per year, but almost 1 in 10 gets to over a thousand euros.
Where does all this interest in trading cards come from? Probably from the support of family adults, who evidently share or even have personally inspired this passion for collecting. Two figures show this clearly: just 18 percent of parents, according to the accounts of those directly involved, oppose this approach of their children to collections; while as many as 40 percent openly support it and, likely, partly finance it.
