Market insights
Built from the same graded-sales data behind the Sales Trends table, covering January 2025 through August 2026. Every figure below is sourced from GemRate.
Each line starts at 100 in January 2025. A soccer line at 250 means soccer card sales volume that month was 2.5× its January 2025 level.
Soccer is the standout: by August 2026 its indexed sales sat at roughly 6× their January 2025 level, well ahead of basketball (3.7×), baseball (2.7×), and hockey (2.1×). NFL football cards grew the least of the five, ending at about 1.5× their starting level.
Soccer as a percentage of total sales volume across all 12 tracked categories, each month.
Soccer went from a rounding error to a real category. Its share of total tracked sales climbed from 2.81% in January 2025 to a peak of 11.37% in July 2026, before easing back to 6.53% in August — still more than double where it started. That July spike and August pullback aren't noise: both show up as statistically flagged anomalies in the anomaly detection below.
Top 15 players by percentage growth, filtered to those with at least $30,000 in recent 3-month sales to exclude noise from very low-volume cards.
The breakout list mixes brand-new professionals with unexpected veteran and even retired-player revivals — a reminder that short-term spikes often come from a small base of sales and don't always signal a durable trend. Cross-check any breakout name against its absolute sales volume in the Sales Trends table before reading too much into a single quarter.
Single-month % change for soccer players, filtered to at least $3,000 in prior-month sales to avoid tiny-base distortion.
Top gainers
Top decliners
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Compares each player's most recent 3-month growth rate to their growth rate in the 3 months before that — a second derivative on top of the breakout chart above. Filtered to players with at least $15,000 in recent 3-month sales.
Accelerating
Cooling off
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Coefficient of variation (volatility ÷ average) over the trailing months, for players with at least $15,000 in recent 3-month sales. Lower means steadier; higher means spike-and-fade.
Most consistent risers
Most volatile
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Players with zero recorded sales in every prior month who debuted with at least $500 in sales this month — a first read on which rookies and debut cards are entering the market.
Category structure
These four cuts look past individual players to the shape of each category itself: how top-heavy it is, who's just shown up, how the sports move together, and which months were statistical outliers.
Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of sales concentration among players in each sport, using the trailing 3 months. Below 1,500 is broadly diversified; 1,500–2,500 is moderately concentrated; above 2,500 is highly concentrated around a few names.
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Pearson correlation between each pair of sports' month-by-month sales totals over the full tracked history. Closer to 1.0 means the two categories tend to rise and fall together.
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Average recent-3mo-vs-prior-3mo growth rate for soccer players, grouped by the same Emerging / Established / Veteran eras used in the breakout chart above. Filtered to at least $5,000 in recent 3-month sales.
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Flags any sport's month-over-month % change that sits at least 1.5 standard deviations from that sport's own historical average swing — a statistical way of spotting which recent moves were genuinely unusual.
Every player behind these charts is searchable in the full sales trends table, or see raw 12-month volume by sport on Category Volumes.