Over a slightly crackly Zoom meeting, I’m chatting to Melbourne businessman Laine Pearce.
“It sold for $50,000, I think,” he says to me, eyelids noticeably unbatted.
“$50,000?!” I exclaim to myself, flabber well and truly gasted.
From the outside, the footy card industry might appear cultish. Thousands of mostly middle-aged men, initially indoctrinated by Aussie rules and now head-over-heels for little rectangles with photos of the game’s players. Really forking out for them too.
We’ll start with Pearce. Originally from Tasmania but now in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs, he works a nine-to-five on weekdays, before spending some time with his family and the St Kilda Saints on weekends.
He spent four years studying aerospace engineering then fifteen more putting those skills to use, but, as of this January, Pearce is a full-time card grader. I had to ask him what that meant.
“These trading cards are pieces of cardboard; they’re subject to dents, wear, tear, corners getting bent,” he tells. “And when it comes to collecting, a lot of people want them in pristine condition.”
“So [collectors] send it to [my]company to do an assessment. Has it got really sharp corners? Is the image clear? Is the colour on the picture as it should be? Is it centred nicely on the card, or is it off to one side, or up, or down?
“Then I’ll give it a value out of 10. A one? That means the card’s the sort of thing that, back in the ‘90s, kids like me would’ve stuck in the spokes of their bike tire to make it sound like a motorbike. A 10? That’s a pristine example of that card. It’s highly regarded for collectors and the secondary market – eBay or other marketplaces that sell items second-hand,” he explains.
Pearce’s business – The Hobby – sprouted from a Facebook group which, slowly, the card community converged into. It’s now, as he describes, composed of four employees in a Point Cook office “sorting, packing and shipping orders”, plus three remote workers helping enter data for the “seven thousand items listed online”.
While most orders come from the U.S. (a Mickey Mantle baseball card can sell for “up to AU$6 million”), the Australian market is clearly thriving.
“There’s been a perfect storm,” Pearce observes.
“People in their late 30s, maybe 40s, used to collect back in the ‘90s, but we all went away from that as the late ‘90s came about. We’re in high school – it’s not cool to collect cards anymore. Then people go to university, get a job and do whatever they do for the next 15 years.
“But they get to the age now where they’re a bit older. These guys are CEOs of companies and have all this money floating around. They get back into it, look around and see that this card world has evolved from where it was when they were there.”
Pearce’s storytelling hooks now deepen their hold on my already-lured attention.
“It was building up through 2016/17, and even more through ‘18/19. But then we had COVID here. All these people who were previously working hard out of an office all day were stuck at home – potentially without a job, maybe getting some money from the government – and suddenly went, ‘what can I do?’”
And what did they do? Well, they trawled the Internet to find social media awash with booming footy card groups, aggressive bidding wars and viral videos of “card breaks”.
Regularly racking up tens of thousands of views, COVID-era card breaks often involved one person buying a box of cards, splitting the cost with friends or followers, then streaming the unboxing as viewers hoped for a lucky break and valuable cards.
Then there’s the hard-line economic perspective. According to Pearce, many noticed the pandemic-induced “volatility” in stock markets and hence looked for “alternative assets” to invest in.
“Trading cards have been a very strong growth asset for about the last two decades,” he says.
“All these rich people in hedge funds were saying, ‘hang on, there’s this other investment opportunity that we have now – the sports card industry.’
“A lot of that’s culminated in the growth of the community.”
While Pearce keeps much of his (relatively smaller) collection in a safe, protected from sunlight-inflicted ink fading, fellow enthusiast Elliot Dean takes regular time out to appreciate what’s within his folders and folders of footy cards.
“It’s a bit silly spending money then putting them away and never seeing them again,” Dean opines from his Mount Waverley office.
“On a weekly basis, I go into the storage cabinet to go through them. Also because I’m making content for my Instagram page, I want to get some of them out, make some new posts and take some new photos. I just love it.”
The avid collector, a Bombers man who runs footycardguide.com.au, estimates he’s amassed tens of thousands of cards.
“In the pandemic I did do a bit more spending than I would’ve liked just to keep me sane,” he admits.
“There’s a couple that I really, really like.
“One of them is a card of both Gary Ablett Jr and Sr … signed by both of them and limited to only 100 cards. That’s probably worth around $3,000.
“Then there’s one of [Essendon legend] Dick Reynolds that’s actually his first card – super, super rare to come across and, if you found one in decent condition, probably worth several thousand dollars.”
One constant thought clogged my mind as I chatted with Dean and Pearce: why?
So, in search of an answer, I headed to the Brunswick home of card historian and the footy collectables world’s most famous face: that of Rick Milne.
I ask him the question.
“A lot of it’s ego,” he responds.
Blanketed in his blue woolly jumper, Milne pauses, then continues, gesturing.
“A lot of people love to say, ‘look what I’ve got’. Then there are people for whom it’s simply a passion, and they’ve got to have it.
“But if you’ve got something that is pretty much one of kind – only one that’s ever been seen or known – then you can kind of name your own price. There are probably five people in the country who would pay any amount for the right things.”
Milne exudes wisdom from the moment you meet him.
For the best part of 30 years, he’s been the media’s go-to guy for Aussie rules collectables, guesting on radio segments and writing for the AFL Record to aid listeners and readers in valuing, say, a Collingwood bottle cap they found at the bottom of their grandad’s dust-riddled junk box. Sort of like the experts on Antiques Roadshow.
Having been a collector himself for more than six decades, Milne’s not lacking in tangible examples to show me, so he offers a tour.
Posters and posters. Album after album. Tale upon tale. Then there’s what’s in storage.
As the afternoon continues, Milne runs me through the history of footy cards, all the way from the beginning.
“Back in 1870, 1880, 1890, cigarette packets were very small. They only had 10 cigarettes and were soft packs.”
It’s a well-rehearsed story and one that Milne tells mesmerisingly.
“What the company used to do was put a little piece of cardboard in the back of the packet to stiffen it, so when somebody put it in their back pocket, the cigarettes wouldn’t break.
“Anyway, some person with a very bright idea said, ‘why don’t we put pictures of something on the little bits of cardboard?’
“That’s where the whole cigarette card phenomenon started.”
Milne carries on to turn through the heavy pages of a metre-wide album he’s put on the floor, one which he’s stuck century-old cards and factory-direct “uncut sheets” into himself. First the 19th century, then the early 20th, he illustrates the evolution of designs as if they were a dear grandchild to him, denoting a deep connection and holding me in a trance.
Once the tour’s over and we sit back down, he explains why his collection isn’t even bigger.
“[In the mid ‘90s, AFL Director of Football Operations] Ian Collins rang me and asked, ‘could you put a collection together for the AFL?’ So I thought, what do I do? How do I go about this?” he remembers.
“I thought the best thing I could do was sell my whole collection. So I did.
“40,000 cards. The AFL now has the best collection in the country.”
After a few more stories, I shake Milne’s hand, thank him, and head back on my way, past the piano and out through the dense and impeccably groomed front garden.
Stepping out onto the street, I take a moment to reflect upon the intricacies of this now-unveiled world that I, as fervent a footy fan as there is, had previously been oblivious to.
I knew cards had been around for decades, but not that they’d originated as a perk for 1880s smokers.
I knew little kids enjoyed the caricatures, but not that their parents did too.
I knew Tony Lockett, Jason Dunstall, Doug Wade and Gary Ablett Sr were good players, but not that finding their signatures and pictures together on a card had made someone $50,000. I can still hardly believe that one. Gob completely smacked.
Harper Pestinger 
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