Darren Rovell’s Bubble Piece

Back in 2025, Darren Rovell published another “sports card bubble could burst” piece. The evidence, at the time, was a Jay Cutler card hitting $12,000 on eBay. The headline on cllct reads “Bubble could soon burst for lower-end cards.” It was, roughly, the sixth or seventh time he had written this piece since 2022.

In early 2022 the warning was the Zion Williamson downward spiral. Later that year it was the post-COVID Luka Doncic correction. In 2023 it was a National Sports Collectors Convention recap noting that cards were “still down big from pandemic highs.” Each one ran in a different outlet — ESPN, Action Network, now cllct — because Rovell has also moved three times in that span.

In 2024, Rovell founded cllct. He raised $4 million from team owners and hedge funds. Another investor: a Houston collector named Patrick Ryan.

Last year, Ryan got caught bidding $20,000 on his own Michael Jordan sticker in a Fanatics Collect auction. Textbook shill bidding. Fanatics restricted his account. cllct covered the story. The disclosure at the bottom of the article notes that Ryan is an investor in cllct.

Rovell has about two million followers on X. When the bubble piece drops, people share it. The market does not crash. A few months later, some card does something strange. Rovell writes the piece again.

There are two ways to be right about a bubble call. You can be early. Or you can be correct. Early gets more attention. He has been early since 2022.

A man who predicts rain every week will eventually be right. You just have to keep showing up to watch him do it.