The Super-Rich Are Spending Millions of Dollars Thrift Shopping
Last week history books had to be inked: the shirt worn by legendary football player Diego Maradona during the historic Argentina v England match in the 1986 World Cup was auctioned off for a pearl-clutching $9.3 million—big enough a price tag to make Macklemore wake up in a sweat and take the Bangladeshi child that sewed it out of extreme poverty if he would ever receive any royalty cuts for the sale.
Why such an exorbitant price?
I know what you're thinking: "It's for the resale value!" It can't be anything else, can it? All of Maradona's sweat has dried off by now so cloning is out of the question. And even if the shirt doubled as a coupon for a free dinner with him, the guy has been under a tombstone since 2020 so all the buyer got was a piece of breathable sports fabric for the price of a 13,000 square feet mansion but without the interior volume to fit nearly as many bathrooms.
Fair to say: Virtually every stock is down right now so maybe t-shirt flipping is the temporary workaround for those that want to keep their beer money flowing until r/WallStreetBets organizes the next GameStop shitfest.
But the sports memorabilia market is not that much of a gold mine.
19 seasons of Pawn Stars might've led us to believe that you can fish a quarter out your asscrack, take it to an expert asscrack quarter appraiser and "Oh là là! It turns out to be the very same quarter that got stuck all the way up the rectum of Count Nobody McAres of Chockablocksville! Go pay off your mortgage, ye lucky devil!" In reality though, the market of collectables is solid in the very same way a fart isn't.
Hard to argue with this: Keeping that Kate Middleton action figure on the shelf hoping it would appreciate in value is not only risky but much less profitable than keeping it classic and pouring some money on the S&P 500. Making money doesn't need to be more complicated than that.
So if it's not for the profit, then what is it?
The vast majority of collectables end up being worth the amount of dust they collect so the only reason the memorabilia market is rising is that lockdowns closed the polo clubs and 3 years of mask mandates kinda killed the mood of yacht parties so the super-rich had to find new ways of enjoying their fortune before it got eaten away by inflation. There are also psychological and evolutionary reasons for hoarding shit, and as Jay Leno proves, guys would literally stockpile a $52 million car collection and enjoy the tax deduction before going to therapy or letting O'Brien have the Tonight Show.
But why do these pieces of memorabilia have to get so expensive?
This might be a hard concept to grasp for those of us outside the 1% elite, but when the bottom of Maslow's pyramid of needs is indulged with luxury and fashion for so long, rich people need to step up their game into ever-increasing realms of absurd materialism if they wanna get that sweet dopamine rush.
Jump to this conclusion: It sounds obvious but if you buy a shirt from 1986 in the high seven figures is not to turn it into a rug for cleaning windows—it's for the historical weight it carries, the nostalgic value, its rarity and its overall appeal.
This takes us back to Maradona's shirt.
Things were effervescent between the two countries during that 1986 match, as only 4 years prior Argentina went full "Settlers of Catan" on the Falkland Islands, and it only took the brits 74 days to bomb the shit out of the Argentinian army and claim the islands back. So there it was Diego Maradona, carrying an entire country's bruised ego, scoring two of the most iconic goals in the history of the sport and setting up a World Cup win, all the while wearing that shirt. Steve Hodge might not be remembered as the best football player but he sure as hell pulled off a Warren Buffet-level investing move when he asked Maradona to swap shirts with him.
So, technically...
The super-rich are spending millions of dollars thrift shopping. Their pockets burn with cash and their brains lust for some instant gratification and given that everyone’s stuck in their basements getting high on nostalgia instead of hanging out at cocktail parties, the sports memorabilia market has seen a dramatic uptick in revenue—but don't be fooled by FOMO my fellow plebeians; this is not bitcoin in 2011, just some lavish hobby to keep the wealthy entertained.