I recently took a look at eBay hockey card sales by season, and now I’ll turn my attention to breaking down sales by team. I did a simple search of every team’s current official location and nickname for all sales from April 13, 2020 through April 12, 2021 in eBay’s “Sports Mem, Cards & Fan Shop” category. That means all of these results involve more than just cards–also included are things like jerseys, other clothing items, team-branded knick-knacks, etc.
First, let’s take a look at the top and bottom five teams by the number of eBay listings sold in the last year:
The Penguins can lay claim to moving more items than other team – impressive when you consider the next four teams are all Original Sixers with all the baked-in fandom and cachet that the oldest franchises enjoy. Pittsburgh is also a much smaller market than the next four teams. The star power of players like Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby combined with lots of team success equals a lot of sales of Penguins items (more than nine times as many as the last-place Coyotes).
It is mildly surprising to find two Canadian teams in the bottom five, but keep in mind these results are limited to the mostly USA-based sales on eBay.com, meaning there are probably plenty of Canadian based sales from eBay.ca not accounted for here.
Now for a look at the top and bottom teams by the US dollar amount of sales in the last year:
The Oilers jump from sixth place by volume into a stunning lead when it comes to dollars spent. When I saw that the average Oilers item sold for $97 and the next closest team sold at an average of just $44, I assumed there must have been an error in my numbers. But it ends up making sense when you consider the top Oilers sales and find 59 listings that went for between $10,000 – $85,000! You might have already guessed that most of those sales are graded Wayne Gretzky rookies. There are also multiple Connor McDavid rookies that have gone for five figures. Contrast that with the second-place Penguins, who have “only” sold nine five-figure listings, the highest of which was a $30,000 graded Sidney Crosby Young Guns auto buyback numbered to 10.
By separating out Gretzky and non-Gretzky results for the Oilers, I find that The Great One alone accounts for 33% of Oilers sales by volume and 62% by dollar amount!
Finally, here are the sales numbers for all 31 clubs, sorted by most moolah spent:
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