If you are from North America, you will have grown up in a culture in which baseball, basketball, and American football trading cards are popular. Not only are they collected by sports-loving kids, but they are bought up by adults. Sports fans even invest their money into them. In more recent years, football trading cards have become more popular in Europe and are not just collected by kids.

Unlike baseball cards in the United States, which have a long history of being collected and being worth money, newer football cards of soccer stars are more valuable than older ones. Of course, this isn’t always true as there are some older cards such as Pele’s 1958 World Cup released Rookie Card.

A lot of football card collectors are buying up cards of modern players including Kylian Mbappe, Neymar, and of course, Lionel Messi. The most expensive card currently on the market is a Messi trading card.

Messi’s  2004 Panini Mega Cracks is seen by trading card experts as the Barcelona player’s definitive Rookie Card. While a lot of cards just show players in static positions, the Messi Panini Mega Cracks card is an action shot of him dribbling in the Barcelona kit.

One of the reasons the price of the card is going up and it has become the most expensive football trading card is due to Messi’s impending retirement from the game in the next few years.

Football trading cards is a niche area still and experts claim many cards are underpriced in contrast to the immense popularity of the sport. Collectors that get their hands on some rare and/or valuable Rookie Cards, could one day make a sizeable profit selling those cards on to other collectors. It may not be long until football cards become as profitable as baseball or basketball cards.