Why aren't there more football card collectors?

[Leon]

This is spot on, imo. Money is usually the answer to most questions of this nature. If the football cards were way more valuable there would be way more collectors. I go to a local show where there is always a guy with in ipad walking around. I try to get away from him quickly but every now and then he catches me and has to show me something I could give a rats ass about. One time he showed me a holy grail of his. The build up was great and I was expecting something fantastic and really valuable. So he pulled out his trusty ipad (I hate them) and showed me a Mickey Mouse card. I acted interested and asked the value of such a holy grail? He told me about a hundred bucks. I said wow, that is great. But to be honest had he said 10k I would have been more interested . Truth be told, money keeps people interested. Jeff Burdick would have hated today's collectors.

Originally Posted by OlderTheBetter

That's not really what I was trying to say. What I meant to say was that many collectors pretend to not care about the financial value of their collection when in fact it's a major factor.

And often they're not collecting modern issues because they know that these cards will never have much financial value... But they won't tell you that.

This kind of hypocrisy in the so-callled "hobby" was always there, but has become more obvious as older cards become much more expensive in comparison to modern cards. Modern issues are often scorned because they're not valuable and most likely never will be.

The original OP posed the question about why there aren't more football collectors and my opinion is that many collectors with real money to spend aren't collecting football as much as baseball because they perceive the ROI to be less. At least I am willing to admit that this has been the case for me.

These are just pictures of players on cardboard -- and it's getting harder to justify the cost.

If all vintage cards were relatively cheap this would not be the case and we'd
all probably be like those guys in the pre-1970 era, scooping up everything in sight.

--Dave