"There are people who are crazy about buying Lamine Yamal trading cards as an investment for the future."

BarcelonaThere are several trading cards on the table. Lamine Yamal, Leo Messi, Alexia Putellas. Any two people exchanging cards, someone observing the scene from a distance might coldly summarize. But the cards that Ferran Roig (Barcelona, 1977) has left on the table are as if he had drawn ace after ace in a poker game. Some are worth thousands of euros. And those of Lamine Yamal have only just begun to increase in price this year. The one from the Rocafonda neighborhood of Mataró It also drives collectors crazy.

"Now, the ungraded Lamine Yamal MasterRookie card (appraised, verified, and coded by a specialized company) is going for 90 euros. And the 108 bis Lamine Yamal card, in which he appears in action wearing a Barça shirt from last year, is going for 200 euros," explains Ferran. "Lamine Yamal cards were worth three euros a year ago. Anyone paying 200 euros for them now is late. There are people eager to buy a lot of Lamine Yamal cards at this price as a future investment because they hope they'll end up being worth thousands of euros. Currently, he's the jewel of collecting, and every company wants to make his card. Last year, 200 different Lamine Yamal cards came out," he continues. However, he warns of the danger of making this investment bet recklessly: "An Ansu Fati trading card went for 800 euros a few years ago, and now, unfortunately, it has very little value."

But in the world of sticker collecting, the king is still Leo Messi. "I think Lamine Yamal's stickers will never reach the value of Messi's because many more stickers are being issued now. The most sought-after is still Messi. No subsequent sticker has reached the value of the 71 bis Messi sticker from the 2004 Megacrack collection. It came out in a third edition, when they were printing the last packs, and within a small print run. This sticker, graded, reached peaks of tens of thousands of euros during the pandemic." Ferran has it. Specifically, he has four 71 bis Messi stickers and considers without hesitation that they are the best pieces in his collection of half a million stickers, archived in a store. In collecting, the first sticker issued for a player is always the one that will have the greatest value. More than the one from a season in which he won the Champions League or the World Cup.

The Collector's Way

Trading cards of this type will attract collectors from all over Europe and the general public this weekend at the Fira Barcelona Iberian Card Show, where they can find, buy, and sell soccer cards and stickers, some of them signed, but also from other sports and non-sporting themes such as Pokemon, Star Wars, and Dragon Ball. Ferran Roig is the director of the fair, which is holding its first edition in Barcelona after passing through Madrid. "It's a good opportunity to find somewhat difficult-to-see pieces and boxes of slightly more expensive cards," he explains.

Ferran started collecting trading cards as a child and, at 20, began doing so more clandestinely. "At that age, it was hard for me to explain it. I would come back from a party on Saturday and get up early on Sunday to go buy cards at the Mercat de Sant Antoni," he recalls. Now he has a stall there. "I make a living selling soccer cards. On a Sunday, I can interact with 500 people and make around 250 sales, which can range from 50 cents to 100 euros." He likes to define himself as "a collector who collects for others." He looks for pieces that fill the empty spaces in his clients' collections and sells them through EuroSoccerCards, the name of his stall, his website, and his Instagram and TikTok accounts.

He has very different clients. There's one who only collects goalkeepers and another who only collects bad players who have played for Barça. "He asks me, for example, for cards of Matheus Fernandes playing in Brazil." Ferran is also pleased to see more and more girls taking up collecting. Above all, they're looking for women's soccer cards. "Not only has the supply grown, but so has the demand. A good Alexia or Aitana card signed with a low numbering can now fetch 500 euros." He's convinced that the world of card collecting is in a process of growth that has no end, and one ends the conversation with Ferran regretting not knowing where those sticker albums he collected as a child are.