Few, if any, basketball players have been more popular among casual fans over the last year than Indiana Fever superstar Caitlin Clark.
Her popularity has exploded in the card market, too, and her importance to the hobby might have been most evident to Clark and her family late last year.
In a recent interview on "The Eli Manning Show", Clark told the former New York Giants quarterback her dad opted to hand out her basketball cards alongside candy on Halloween.
At the end of the night, the trick-or-treaters had largely opted for the cards.
“My mom loves trick-or-treat, it’s her favorite. She was coming to Indianapolis for the Taylor Swift concert so she wasn’t there — so it’s my dad. My dad, that’s a nightmare for him giving out candy,” Clark said. “I don’t even know if he went and bought candy. He just found the cards in the office and was just handing them out to the kids.
“But then random people the next few days just started showing up at the door, knocking and asking if they could have cards. So it kind of backfired a little bit. It just showed how excited people were about it, they wanted the cards. Nobody wanted the candy, all the candy was left.”
Clark signed an exclusive multi-year deal with Panini America for trading cards and autographed memorabilia in March 2024. The deal was the first of its kind for Panini with a female athlete.
Panini later released the Caitlin Clark Collection to celebrate her historic career with the Iowa Hawkeyes. Clark reportedly worked closely with Panini during the set’s creation.
Clark has since appeared in a number of WNBA sets, including the popular Panini Prizm brand.
In addition to the physical Prizm release, Clark’s cards have been highly coveted among collectors of Panini’s digital cards. One of Clark’s WNBA Prizm Gold Vinyl 1/1 NFTs recently sold for $51,248 to set a record for any WNBA NFT.
That card is also the seventh-most expensive NFT to sell on the Panini Blockchain.
Among the athletes tracked by Market Movers, Clark is 10th in total sales volume over the last 365 days with nearly 56,000 sales. Clark was also among the most graded athletes in 2024, with GemRate logging more than 77,000 submissions for Clark through PSA — that total was the eighth-most among active athletes last year.
Clark also briefly spoke to Manning about her experience collecting as a child and described how much the Panini deal meant to her.
“I was a kid that grew up collecting cards. Me and my older brother would just fight over them all the time, and I’m pretty sure my mom still has the booklet where you would slide all the cards in, so it’s pretty awesome,” Clark said.
“My parents give them out to everybody. My mom just carries them in her purse and kids that want to say 'Hi' or something, she always gives [cards] to them.”
The public record for any Clark card is the $234,850 paid for her 2024 WNBA Select Gold Vinyl 1/1 PSA 10/10 at Goldin in December.
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct.