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The World Cup Didn't Do What You Think It Did
Everyone's telling the same story about the last four years of soccer cards: World Cup hype builds, prices climb, new fans flood in on cue. We pulled four years of index and volume data to test that story.
It's not what happened.
The real inflection point isn't the tournament everyone assumed it was — it hit months earlier, and almost nobody was talking about it when it did. And the World Cup itself produced a signal that looks completely different from what a "new fans buying in" market should look like — record trading activity moving in the opposite direction from where you'd expect.
We break down the full four-year arc: the two-year slide nobody called, the quiet breakout that actually moved the needle, and why the biggest volume day in our dataset might be the least bullish data point in the whole paper.
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