Making Sense of the PSA 9

‘Raw-to-grade’ has become a bankrolling method championed by collectors and investors alike in order to (hopefully) expand their hobby budget and move into bigger, flashier cards. The fundamental ideology driving the method is that there exists price multipliers between grading brackets, specifically with the grading company PSA, that can drive the value of a card up. Hobbyists will buy and inspect raw, ungraded cards with the hopes of submitting them to PSA and hitting the highest tier of the grading bracket — a PSA 10 — so that the card(s) can be ‘flipped’ onto the secondary market for substantially more than cost of purchase and grading.

But what happens to cards that grade as a PSA 9, one rung lower on the grading ladder?

For soccer cards in particular, general consensus for grading is that only a PSA 10 can command a premium (generally a 2x, or two-times raw value, multiplier) on secondary marketplaces, and that a PSA 9 is the pricing equivalent of a raw, ungraded card. However, there is plenty of heated discussion suggesting that a PSA 9 too should command a premium (1.5x seems to be the agreed upon multiplier), implying that PSA 8s should be considered equivalent value-wise to a raw card.

Admittedly, the driving force behind this blog post is pettiness. Not to say that I don’t want to see everyone succeed in the soccer card hobby, but I found the argument of PSA 9 Premiums interesting, especially in the ultramodern context, because anecdotally most of the ultramodern cards that I had seen were getting PSA 9s. Raw-to-grade to me should be a risky endeavor with inherent downside — if you aren’t submitting the best of the best cards (consistency in PSA’s grading is a whole different can of worms), you shouldn’t be ‘rewarded’, though the PSA 9 Premium argument suggests otherwise. To drive a more quantitative discussion on the matter at hand, I went through the PSA population reports for a handful of ultramodern sets backdating to 2014 to either confirm or refute my belief. While this information may or may not align with your beliefs or frankly what the market believes, nor should it be considered the definitive end-all-be-all to the thesis, hopefully this gives you some insight into the numbers behind the discussion!

Scope

Data

• This is a point-in-time assessment as of August 2, 2024. Population reports may fluctuate as this post ages

• Data captured is strictly from the PSA Population Report database

• Data collected does not encapsulate the entire population report for each set — as the crux of the argument hinges on whether a PSA 8 or PSA 9 is considered the value-equivalent of raw, only PSA 8, 9, and 10 data make up the total sample population

• Data has been captured up until the 2022 season releases as the influx of cards has stabilized. A follow-up to this post may be done to see if newer sets align with what the data suggests

• ‘Base’ includes both Paper and Optic cards when acknowledging sets like Donruss. This is one of many unaccounted for nuances that can be discussed in the Things to Consider section as card positioning in packs and card stock may shift gem rates

Sets

• Sets with at least 1,000 graded cards in the population. 2021 Topps Chrome Bundesliga Sapphire was included as part of the dataset due to the players in the set but does not meet this criteria

• Panini and Topps Releases are the only sets represented in this dataset

• I tried to avoid including paper team sets (e.g., Arsenal Team Set, Chelsea Team Set) as to focus on larger releases. Sets like 2020 Topps Chrome x Steve Aoki and 2022 Topps Chrome FC Barcelona were included as part of the dataset due to grading population but does not meet this criteria

• Sets that are primarily printed on thicker card sets (e.g., Eminence, National Treasures) were omitted from the data set as quality control of cards with larger surface area can heavily skew data. Without looking at the data for those sets, I would not be surprised if a larger population of cards sits in the PSA 8-9 range

• For sets that include both thick and chromium/paper cards (e.g., Select), I did my best to remove the subsets that include those cards from the population of the set

A Non-Statistician’s Take on the Data

Under the assumption that PSA 9s should command a premium, PSA 8s should command the value of a raw card. However, the near-mint rate from the sample data suggests that very few cards submitted receive a 9 — of the sample sets released between 2014-2022, cards released per set will receive a PSA 8, on average, 8% of the time when considering a range of PSA 8 to PSA 10. You are likely to receive an 8 for sets between 2014-2018 11% of the time, and even less likely at 7% for sets between 2019-2022. PSA doesn’t hand out enough ultramodern 8s to justify a PSA 8 being considered the price of a raw card.

Panini and Topps sets released around the 2019-20 season mark seems to be the breakpoint in an increase in gem-rate for your average soccer set. Of the seventeen sets in the 2014-2018 sample population, seven sets, or 41%, gem at above a 50% clip, with only one set (2017 Topps Chrome UEFA Champions League), or 6%, of the seven gemming at above 60%. Of the forty-seven sets in the 2019-2022 sample population, thirty-four sets, or 72%, gem at above a 50% clip, with sixteen sets, or 34%, of the thirty-four gemming at above 60%.

On average, PSA gives 48% of cards from 2014-2018 sets a PSA 9 from the near-mint to gem-mint bracket, whilst giving PSA 9s to 2019-2022 cards 38% of the time. For the sample sets created post-2018, you are more likely to gem a card than you are to receive at 9.

Things to Consider / Notes

• As mentioned in the scope of the exercise, PSA does not easily differentiate between paper base and optic base when describing mixed sets like Donruss. A quick analysis suggests that these products have a lower gem rate relative to their peers, so it would be a worthy conversation to differentiate the two grading rates

• The data set does not differentiate between numbered parallels and gem rate populations amongst numbered cards. If you have a parallel serialized to 10, all ten cards have been graded, and the population skews to most grades being an 8 or below, in this instance it may make sense to command a PSA 9 premium

  “Buy the card, not the grade!”

• Similar to serialization, because of the surface area for grading, die-cuts may also command a PSA 9 premium because there are more points in which edgewear may occur

• Despite known issues in sets, notably the notch in 2020 Bundesliga Sapphire, the gem rate for ultramodern sets generally known as ‘hard-to-grade’ is fairly high relative to their peers

Haters (me) win again.

TL;DR - As a wide-sweeping generalization, PSA 9s should be considered the value-equivalent of raw and should not command any premium outside of maybe grading fees.