How Sotheby’s sports memorabilia category is attracting new customers

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Auction house Sotheby’s is synonymous with fine arts, jewelry, and other rare collectibles, but the 280-year-old business is bringing its curatorial expertise into the modern day with a growing category: sports memorabilia.

Sotheby’s, which began as a London-based seller of rare books, has been expanding its sporting category since 2020 under the leadership of Brahm Wachter, SVP and head of modern collectibles. In his previous role at the company, he worked on bringing a younger generation into the auction house’s fold. Wachter leveraged the success of hit pandemic-era series The Last Dance to list a pair of Michael Jordan game-worn sneakers at $100,000; it sold for $560,000. This was all the evidence Wachter needed to build up the momentum for the division, which now moves over 4,000 objects a year. The sports memorabilia market has experienced exponential growth in a relatively short period of time, with its estimated value in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

“The last projection I read is that the valuation of sports memorabilia globally will reach $220 billion plus by 2032. It’s a market where we see new collectors entering all the time,” Wachter said.

A younger clientele

Wachter said Sotheby’s sports memorabilia category has brought in a whole new set of customers that traditionally didn’t participate in its auctions.

“When you think about categories that are going to grow in the future, you’re talking about a young audience that will likely accumulate more wealth as generational wealth is passed from one to another,” Wachter said. “We see a lot of growth here.”

He said 60% of bidders and 70% of buyers in Sotheby’s 2024 streetwear and collectibles sales were new to the auction house, with millennial and Gen Z clients making up nearly half of all bidders.

Slam dunk

Within sports memorabilia, Sotheby’s NBA partnership has been its most lucrative initiative. As of 2023, the auction house is now the official source for NBA game-worn memorabilia. According to Wachter, Sotheby’s has “consistently broken over $9 million in sales in aggregate” since announcing the partnership; in 2024, each lot had an average of six bidders, with 65% of overall bidders and 80% of overall buyers new to Sotheby’s.

Wachter said he sees NBA auctions as a conduit to bigger purchases.

“Sometimes somebody will come in and get their first taste of collectible purchasing through the NBA deal, and then they’ll go on to buy something really big in one of our various owner auctions,” Wachter said. 

Casting a wider net

While Sotheby’s NBA partnership proves to be fruitful, Wachter has his eye on other sports, like Formula 1, baseball, football, and tennis. Most recently, Sotheby’s revealed its inaugural partnership with the US Open, where it auctioned the championship clinching ball for roughly $90,000.

In 2022, Sotheby’s auctioned Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” jersey from the 1986 World Cup for $9.3 million, in what is believed to be the highest price ever fetched for a sports memorabilia item.

As it continues to build out its NBA partnership, starting next year the division will also focus on moving trading cards.

“Sotheby’s sees a growing category where we can bring in new clients that will transact in other categories, whether it’s watches, jewelry, handbags, art…While it brings in people that go and bid on all kinds of things, the category itself is also expanding,” he said.