The commercial side of sports memorabilia

A shirt that was worn at a football match was once sold at the price of $224,000 in the Unites States. Reason – It was worn by the famous player Pele at the World cup final in 1970 where Brazil went on to win the game. Surprised? You needn’t be, since this is just one example among the many of sports memorabilia creating history.

If you are new to the term, sports memorabilia is any item that is related to sports or sports personalities like shirts and jerseys worn by the players, balls, bats, gloves, shoes, etc. These items are usually collected by a sports fan who is crazy about it or a collector who would sell it back at a many times higher price in the market later. Most of us had the hobby of collecting game cards of our favorite sports item when we were children. Some of us still do. Well, the news is that some of those cards today can bring you millions, if you play your cards smart, literally.

If you are planning to collect sports memorabilia there are a few points for you to keep in mind to make sure you get the high returns you were looking for when you started on it.

• Decide whether you want to collect items as a hobby or business. If you aim to sell the collectibles later make sure that you will not get attached to them and hesitate to sell in future.

• Decide on a particular sports, player, era or tournament before you start collecting. Hoarding up random items from here and there will only make it confusing for you.

• Collect as much information as possible before you buy items from the market. Here if you have narrowed down your field of interest to collect memorabilia from a single sport item or player, it could help you a lot. You need to know only lesser facts and that would make your buying and selling easier. And with the Internet facility now, collecting information has never been faster.

• Get advice from an experienced person as to how and where to buy and sell items. Collecting sports memorabilia is a tricky field and if you are not smart you’ll be easily deceived. And of course, there is never a lack of tricksters and cheats in this field. Also, assure the credentials of the person whom you seek advice from.

• Keep yourself updated on what is happening in the market. The best way to do this would be to become a part of an online forum that deals with sports memorabilia. A mere search in Google could bring you hundreds of such forums.

• When you trade your collectible try as much as possible to buy or sell locally. This would not only save you shipping charges but would also save you from being tricked.

Collecting sports memorabilia takes a lot of time, effort, patience and often luck too. Sometimes you’ll find an item you’ve been looking for years later and sometimes it’ll come your way just like that. The only way here is to keep your ears and eyes open always for any news in the field. Also, you need a little intuition here to know which item would be popular sometime in future and which would lose its market. In other words, sports memorabilia is for a genuine sports enthusiast who is aware of all aspects of a game.


At Suthbe.com you can see a huge range of Football Programmes, Antiques and Sports Memorabilia.