For £12m, you could buy a seven-bedroom mansion in Hampstead, north London, or a Bugatti La Voiture Noire, one of the world’s most coveted sports cars, with a few hundred thousand quid to spare. Alternatively, you could blow it all on a Pokémon card.
This is what AJ Scaramucci, son of financier and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, did earlier this month when he bought the world’s only Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) 10-graded Pikachu Illustrator card, one of the rarest and most coveted Pokémon cards ever, at auction. The seller, YouTuber, wrestler and occasional boxer Logan Paul, made a mighty profit after flipping the card for about £8m more than the £3.9m he originally paid for it in 2021.
But trading cards aren’t just a hobby for the ludicrously rich, they’re booming across the board. In the US, Walmart Marketplace saw trading card sales increase by 200% between February 2024 and June 2025, and eBay said last July that trading card sales had surged for 10 straight financial quarters. In the UK, Pokémon are such hot and valuable tickets that they have become the target for a spate of thefts.
The Pokémon company, which celebrated its 30th birthday on Friday, is now the world’s biggest media franchise, with total revenues of $147bn (£110bn), according to Guinness World Records.
It’s not just Pokémon trading cards that are going stratospheric. Football cards are also big business. At Fanatics Collectibles in central London, “auto cards”, which feature a real autograph of a leading sports star, are on sale for thousands of pounds, and a Lionel Messi card sold for nearly $9,500 last year. There are also more niche cards, such as Labubu and SpongeBob sets on sale for hundreds of pounds. Rip tables are dotted about the shop floor, where customers can open their packet of cards there and then. Some days, when celebrities including Lewis Hamilton, Roman Kemp and Rio Ferdinand host events, queues can stretch around the block.
But while the hobby has made headlines for the significant sums the cards can yield, what does the average collector think of the recent frenzy? Penny, from Stockholm in Sweden, has been collecting Pokémon cards since she was 15. Now 29, she reckons she owns about 16,000 cards.
Among her prized examples are a base set Charizard in “loved condition”, which can sell from anywhere between $300 (£222) to more than $10,000 (£7,400), depending on the condition, an Eevee card from Legendary Collection, which is worth about $500, and recently she pulled a Golden Dragonite valued at about $600. But she doesn’t keep them sealed in a box to ensure they’re in tip-top, resalable condition. “I’m a collector, not an investor,” she said.
For Penny, it’s all about touching, enjoying and actually playing with the cards. “The game was first of all made for kids, and I think that’s how it should still be,” she said.
She collects master sets, which means she needs only one of each card. “I donate duplicates to charity or I make little goodie bags for Halloween instead of candy,” she said.
As a YouTuber who shares her passion online, there are some challenges. “I get so many comments about being a fake nerd or people saying you’re only doing it for the attention,” she said. But she has seen more women and girls getting into the hobby. “When I was a child, there weren’t that many girls who enjoyed Pokémon. It’s nice to be able to encourage other little girls to follow their hobbies and enjoy what they enjoy,” she said.
Penny works in a toy shop where she has seen “a big increase” in people buying Pokémon cards. But this also means she sees some of the negative aspects of collecting. “It’s fun to see so many more people coming in. But it’s a little bit sad with the investing part of it because people are just opening packs to open packs. They don’t really care about what’s inside. It’s kind of like gambling, which is not really how it should be in my opinion,” she said.
“I know so many parents are like: ‘If my kid pulls this Charizard then I’m going to take it away from them straight away because it’s a valuable card.’ It’s a piece of cardboard. I understand the value is high on them but it’s still supposed to be fun,” she said.
Ryan Back, 34, who runs a jams and chutneys businesses with his wife, Abby, was keen on Pokémon as a child but moved away from the hobby as he grew up. This changed in 2020, during Covid, when he rediscovered his love for the cards.
He believes the Pokémon company has “shifted the age range that they accommodate to”, namely people in their late 20s to early 30s, to “recapture the nostalgia of their childhood”.
He owns a “few thousands cards” which, he says, is not a lot compared with other collectors. “If you’ve been collecting for a long time, it easily adds up,” he said.
He owns a few valuable examples, including a Charizard from Pokémon 151, a rereleased set of cards featuring all the original characters, which has a coveted PSA 10 grade, the highest rating indicating the card is in immaculate condition. Sometimes, a card can be knocked down a few grades before it is even taken out of the packet because of the way it’s graded. “If the centring is off and one border is thicker than the other, that can immediately make it not a 10,” said Back.
Also a YouTuber, he said he “stands against a lot of what the hobby” is currently about, namely chasing high-value cards. He said scalping, where people hoard packs of cards by clearing out shops to sell online for a profit, is a big problem.
While the £12m Pokémon card sale has drawn eyes to the hobby, Back thinks it may falsely skew people’s expectations. “I think a lot of people are entering the hobby thinking somehow they’re going to make loads of money or they’re going to pull a card that’s worth stupid crazy amounts of money. That’s not really the case.”
