A stranger stopped a grandmother as she left her temple and offered her $500, cash, on the spot, for the basketball in her hands. She'd just won it in a raffle she barely understood entering and said no, because a stranger that eager made her suspicious. She took it home and called her son. "Somebody signed it," she said. "I don't know who. Something Michael something." A pause on the line. "Mom — please wait until I come pick up this ball. Don't touch it."
That basketball — signed by Michael Jordan — is where one of the most quietly remarkable stories among women in the sports card hobby begins. The grandmother is 98 now, and one of Rebecca's best friends in the world. The woman who inherited that ball went on to build a world-class Messi–Ronaldo collection while the entire hobby assumed she was a man. Some of them, on the auction app Whatnot, assumed she was a kid — a preteen boy. "Are you going to get your dad to help you pack these up?" they'd ask. She was thirty, sitting alone in her apartment, sorting a collection most of them would envy.
Fig 1: Rebecca with her soccer collector, which went viral on Instagram
The Ball That Started Everything
The Jordan ball her granny won took the long way to Rebecca. Her uncle held onto it, then passed it to her cousin, who finally handed it to her when she graduated from college in 2018. She didn't know it yet, but it had just made her a collector.
Her first instinct tells you everything about how she thinks. She didn't want to sell it — she wanted to complete it. A signed jersey to hang beside it. A display. Then she looked up what a signed Jordan jersey costs and, in her words, "I will not." So she chased what she could: a Hank Aaron bat and glove, bought two days before he passed away in 2021, after which they became nearly impossible to find. Luck and timing, again and again. It would become the pattern of her whole collection.
Fig 2: The signed Michael Jordan basketball, won in a temple raffle and passed down three generations before it reached Rebecca
Why She Quit Memorabilia Cold
Memorabilia broke her heart a little. She'd watch items she or her friends had gotten signed in person — standing right there, watching the pen move — get rejected by authentication companies. "But I was there," she'd think. "I know it's real." It didn't matter. The company's opinion outranked her eyes.
So she looked at cards, and nearly quit those, too. The 1990s "junk wax" era buried baseball, basketball, and football under so much overprinting that whole sets are worth almost nothing — and dodging the landmines meant memorizing every release. It felt like a game rigged against newcomers. Then the obvious hit her: "I played soccer my whole life. Why would I not collect soccer cards exclusively?"
That single decision — collect what you already know cold — is the most useful thing a new collector can steal from Rebecca. It turned soccer card collecting from a minefield into her home turf.
The Collector's Lens, Learned By Accident
Every collectible lives or dies by the same three things: condition, rarity, and provenance. Rebecca didn't know the words. She learned them by feel.
Rarity found her first: During the overpriced COVID stretch, a friend in Venezuela sold her completed 2006 World Cup sets for almost nothing — he had dozens. She was wandering around with ten complete sets, no idea they mattered. Then one card stopped her: Messi and Ronaldo, together. "My two favorite players — everybody's two favorite players. It's gotta be iconic." She started buying every matchup she could find, in any condition. Curious what pulling one himself would cost, she priced a sealed box: $6,000. "No, thank you."
Provenance is the soul of it: "Most of my cards come with cool stories," she says, "because I collected them when it was all very new." You can buy a card later. You can't buy having been early. You can't buy being there.
Condition she learned the hard way — because of what was sitting in a plastic bag in her drawer.
The Card She Forgot She Owned
Early on, before she knew a bookend from a base card, a friend offered her a purple Messi–Ronaldo matchup. Numbered to 99. First off, the print run. Graded PSA 9. None of those words meant anything to her yet.
"So how much debt am I going into for this?" she asked him.
"It's not that bad," he said. "Don't worry. It'll go up eventually."
She trusted him. She bought it. And then — this is the part that's hard to believe — she put it in a plastic bag in a drawer and forgot she owned it. No case. No sleeve. She was that new.
Years passed. She got deeper in. She learned what PSA meant, what a bookend was, and what "first off the print of the debut Prizm set" actually signified in a collection like hers. And one day, cataloging what she had, a thought surfaced from somewhere: I think there's a card in a bag in my drawer.
She went and looked.
"Holy crap," she remembers thinking, holding it. "I can't believe I have this card."
It's now one of the most valuable cards she owns. A few years later, the friend who sold it circled back and asked to buy it again. She thanked him and said no. Her other favorite is equal only in the chase it took: a Pelé on-card autograph from the Nobility set, numbered to 40, still sealed in its original cellophane, that took her years to hunt down.
Fig 3: A slice of the Messi–Ronaldo matchup collection. Rebecca says she'll "talk about forever"
What Happened When the Hobby Found Out
For years, being anonymous was an advantage. Deals came in fairly because nobody was pricing her based on her gender. Then a post about her collection went viral, and the secret was gone.
The reactions forked. Plenty of collectors were thrilled — "We don't have any women in our friend group, let's be friends." But the bigger buyers and breakers sometimes turned, suddenly misquoting a card's value mid-bid, the moment they clocked who she was. Her response never changes: "I know exactly what it's worth. Let's not play this game."
She's turned the stereotype into a weapon, too. Her husband collects Pokémon, and at TCG shows she's the one who walks up to the table: "Jigglypuff's my favorite — it's so cute." Nine times out of ten, the seller drops the price for the sweet girl who clearly doesn't know better. She knows exactly what she's doing. "And I'm just like: sucker."
As for why the sports card hobby has so few women when TCG is full of them, her theory is blunt and hard to argue with: you collect who you can relate to, and the sports world barely puts women on the screen, let alone the cardboard. Fix the fandom, she says, and the collectors follow. When she started, she could count the women with any real presence in the community on one hand.
The Mascot Card That Stumped Us
We tested the Collectibles.com scanner on her, live. She aimed it at a 2014 World Cup Portugal silver team card — not exactly a headliner — and it matched in 13 seconds. Then she reached for a curveball: a 2023 Women's World Cup mascot card she'd grabbed at a show for $20. It wasn't in our database of over 300 million products. Nobody had ever scanned it. So she logged it herself — the first collector on record to do so.
Which is the whole point for anyone starting. A PSA 9 slept in Rebecca's drawer for years because she had no system, no record, and no way to know what she was holding. A new collector today doesn't have to learn that the expensive way — you scan it, you know it, you never lose track of the gem in the bag again.
Start Tracking Your Collection →
If You're Just Starting Out
Rebecca's whole journey compresses into a handful of hard-won rules:
- Collect what you already know. Your expertise is your armor against bad deals. Hers was soccer.
- Chase the story, not just the star. Provenance — being early, being there — is what makes a card yours.
- Never gamble on rookies. She calls it "worse than gambling." You're rarely holding the next Messi.
- Protect it from day one. Learn the condition and storage before you own anything you'd hate to lose.
- Go cheap and weird. She adores mascot cards — often $20, little resale value, endless charm. The perfect low-stakes way in.
- Follow Rebecca at @soccercardpc, where the Messi–Ronaldo talk never stops! She summed up why she finally stepped out of the shadows in one line: "Anytime we can get more exposure for women, that's the goal."
Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel →
Whether it's your first card or your thousandth, Collectibles.com is the super app to scan, value, organize, and showcase everything you collect.
