Soon after the Eagles won Super Bowl LIX, tickets for the Philly Show went on sale. The website didn’t just slow down. It went down. In every way. That is not a sales pitch; it is a signal. An important part of the hobby had changed, and Philadelphia was right in the middle of it.
Since 1975, The Philly Show has been on the air. Something like a card show takes fifty years, which is a long time. It takes place at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and covers more than 140,000 square feet. More than 300 dealers from more than 20 states attend, and the over 1,100 tables are filled with everything from old baseball cards to new Pokémon cards. On the East Coast, it’s always been one of the shows with the most people. But this year was different in a way that’s tough to describe.
It was just after the Super Bowl that Philadelphia won. Over thirty champion players showed up to sign. The Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl LIX. Jalen Hurts was there. Nick Sirianni, DeVonta Smith, Cooper DeJean, and A.J. Brown were also really good. Nick Foles, who won MVP in Super Bowl LII, was there with Chase Utley, Mike Schmidt, and Steve Carlton, who are all legendary Phillies players. There were tables full of trading cards, but it wasn’t really a card show. It was more of a community event.
When you walk into a place like that, you get the sense that you’re seeing the hobby do something it doesn’t always do: connect cleanly with the big sports moment. There’s often a lag. Once a player breaks out, interest slowly grows, and prices slowly go up over weeks. This time, the energy came right away. Even though the Super Bowl was over, the city still wasn’t cool, and collectors were already out the door.
The 2025 NFL season had been building up to this kind of moment on the field. With nine weeks gone, almost 60% of the league is still in the running for the playoffs, making this one of the most competitive and unpredictable seasons in recent memory. When there is a lot of equal power, both casual fans and collectors are likely to keep watching, which may be better for the market.
That uncertainty is shown in real time by eBay’s midseason data. Daniel Jones and Quentin Johnston both saw a 280% rise in search volume after having good months in September. More than 340% more people looked for Jaxson Dart after the Giants beat the Philadelphia Eagles on October 10. After an early-season Vikings win, J.J. McCarthy led to more than 2,900 searches around the world per hour. There are more than just curiosity clicks here. When searches move like that, sales usually follow.
Which of these rookies will still be useful after the season is over is still not clear. A lot of September hits have gone away by December in this hobby. Collectors aren’t waiting around to find out, though, as evidenced by the fact that listings for players like Emeka Egbuka, Tucker Kraft, and Jacory Croskey-Merritt went up by 550% on eBay just in September. They’re buying because the market is moving quickly, which is both fun and risky.
The biggest single sale of the season helps put everything in its proper place. We bought a 2017 National Treasures Gold Patrick Mahomes Rookie Patch Auto in September for $96,100. It was graded a PSA 10. Mahomes is clearly not a rookie anymore. But that sale makes me think of what these cards could become in the future, which is why collectors keep looking for the next stage of that story every season.
The Philly Show, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary with broken attendance records and a server that gave out from the demand, may have made it clearest. It’s not just that the hobby is going well. It happened at the right time and in the right city.
