[samosa4u]

$5,000 USD for a Pele card in 2015 was crazy money and 99.99% of collectors would never have done this. Like Scott pointed out, this PSA 9 card was listed for sale on here, and nobody wanted it. Even in 2016, I had a chance to purchase some nice Pele cards for a few thousand, and I thought the seller was out of his mind.

We often spend a lot of time debating over how many of these albums exist in Brazil, but this is something that I care very little about. We need to ask ourselves the following question: what made these soccer cards take off in value in the first place? The answer is PSA. When collectors started seeing these Pele cards in PSA holders, they went bonkers. Do you think those Pele cards on Heritage would have brought in those prices if they had been in SGC holders? Definitely not. Collectors want PSA.

Now the thing that bothers me is that PSA has been closing the door on some of these popular soccer sets. For example, they no longer grade the 1958 Titulares set, and this is very bad. This set has the true rookies of Pele, because it was issued before the Quigols. I've tried to get PSA to reverse their decesion on the Titulares cards, and they have been very polite with me, but so far their answer remains a "no." They are also no longer grading the 1947 Nannina cards, and this set has the Ferenc Puskás rookie. This is another blow for soccer cards.

The question we should be asking here is this: what will PSA do next? What if they decide to stop grading the Quigols? Remember, the #109 Pele has been driving the vintage soccer card market, and if the company shuts the door on this set, then we are in BIG trouble!

That's my take on this whole thing