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34 Global Identification - September 2006

by Prof. David C. Wyld, Southeastern Louisiana

University

special report on ANTICOUNTERFEITING

They say beauty is in the eye of beholder, and the same could

be said of value when it comes to sports memorabilia. However,

the true value of such items is becoming increasingly difficult

to assess and the market is often flooded with fakes. And that’s

where RFID can step in to help

34 Global Identification - October 2008

Valuable memories

photo by by Dana Graves

35www.global-identification.com

Autograph seekers. They are a part of every profes-sional ‒ and often

amateur ‒ athlete’s life. They are a fixture at sports teams’ training camps, hotels and stadiums, or anywhere these signature collectors know that athletes will have to pass through on their way to or from an event. They also are a part of the well-known athlete’s every move, as au-tograph seekers can make it uncomfortable, even im-possible, for them and their families to enjoy a meal in public or a trip to an amuse-ment park. Many of these autograph hunters are kids, looking to get that one au-tograph of the pro baseball or football star they admire ‒ the one whose poster they have hanging over their bed. However, some of the signa-ture hounds are also adults, looking to have literally any athlete they can sign any team item ‒ a ball, a bat, a helmet, a jersey, etc. ‒ in or-der to turn an ordinary item into a collectible.

The motivation of many of these autograph seekers is innocent. The kid who admires his or her favorite sports star ‒ whether it’s Tiger Woods, Brett Favre, Kobe Bryant, Alex Rodriguez or David Beckham ‒ can have a lasting memory not just from the signed item, but from their brief encoun-ter with a sports legend. All too often however, the mo-tive for kids and adults alike

is money as the chance is there to cash-in on the ath-lete’s celebrity. The worst of the lot ‒ grown-ups who hire children to seek out stars’ autographs on a paid basis ‒ work on the premise that the “cute kid factor” might

entice the sports star to stop and sign an item for a 9 year-old that they wouldn’t for a 40 year-old man.

Yet, the real truth of the matter is that while a signed article can be a point of per-sonal pride, even perhaps a family heirloom, the actual value of the item to knowl-edgeable sports memorabil-ia collectors is very limited. That is because of the need to provide verifiable proof of the autographed item’s au-thenticity. Yes, you may have been at the New Orleans Saints’ training camp in Jack-son, Mississippi (as my sons and I were this summer) and personally witnessed star running back Reggie Bush autograph a football. How-ever, if you were to want to sell the ball, as opposed to displaying it on a shelf in your son’s room, there’s no irrefutable proof that could assure the first buyer, let alone subsequent buyers in the future, as to the validity of Bush’s signature. Not that this stops autograph seekers

from trying day after day to get that elusive personaliza-tion of basketballs by LeB-ron James, footballs by Pey-ton Manning, baseballs by Derek Jeter, and item after item by a myriad of stars. So disruptive to athlete’s lives

are some autograph hounds that teams today commonly limit access to their players. And, some athletes, such as Michael Jordan, make it publicly known that they will not sign an autograph except through the special events (and often private signing days) for agencies they have contracted to represent them in what has become an increasingly lu-crative market for athletes, supplementing, or even exceeding, what they make


Use of RFID for sports memorabilia parallels its application in other markets like pharma

Dan Werner, Prova’s VP

Marketing, holding up the

authenticated David Beckham

Jersey worn during the 2008

All-Star Game inToronto, Canada


ing to upwards of 90% of all sports collectibles. Thus, this is perhaps the ultimate example of a caveat emp-tor (buyer beware) market. And with this comes a great need to have a solution that

can assure buyers and sell-ers of the authenticity of an item, not just presently but into the future as well, a “chain of custody” if you will. Which sounds like a perfect case for RFID ‒ and it is.

The Sports Memorabilia Market

Anyone can buy a piece of sports memorabilia to hang on the wall or show in a display case, and if you’re happy with the price you paid for it, all the better. However, unless you per-sonally witnessed the ath-lete signing the football, the

odds are that the ball is not worth any more than what you would have paid for an unsigned ball at a sporting goods store.

The sports memorabilia mar-ket can be segmented into two very distinct segments: trusted sources and “other.” Trusted sources include both sports memorabilia shows and sports market-ing agencies. In the former category, there are a grow-ing number of such events, where athletes are available ‒ generally on a paid basis ‒ to sign a limited number of items, both brought in by fans and bought at the show. At these shows, items are signed, with witnesses present and able to authen-ticate the athlete’s signature on a Certificate of Authen-ticity (COA). This certifica-tion is what raises the status and value of an item from being a sports collectible to becoming an item of sports memorabilia. The second trusted source is the sports agencies that contract with athletes to be exclusive pur-

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on the field by simply sign-ing their names. The sports memorabilia market today is a global marketplace, esti-mated to generate revenues in excess of $5 billion annu-ally. However, it is a market

unlike any other, due to the giant presence of counter-feit items.

The official estimate from the Federal Bureau of In-vestigation (FBI) is that 70% of all signed sports collect-ibles on the market in the U.S. are counterfeit ‒ forged signatures on items which themselves may or may not be what they are purported to be (after all, even official merchandise from sports leagues and special events, such as Super Bowls, World Cups, or World Series, can be faked). Industry observers however believe the true fig-ure to be even higher, rang-


Thousands of memorabilia items can now be authenticated and catalogued at events thanks to RFID tagging

A baseball is just a ball, until it’s signed by a star player. A jersey is just a big shirt until it’s worn by an all-star. Then, such items are worth a lot of money, right? Oh, that it were that simple. The website, sportsmemorabilia.com, recently gave a definition to differentiate between two terms that are all too often used interchangeably ‒ sports memorabilia and sports collectibles. In their online publication, A Comprehensive Guide To Collecting Sports Memorabilia, they defined the two terms in the following manner:- Photos, cards, jerseys or related sports equipment that have been signed by an athlete are considered memorabilia when that signature has been certified by a reputable distributor;- Replica and authentic sports products that are unsigned, or are signed but not authenticated, are considered collectibles. Source: www.sportsmemorabilia.com

What makes an item qualify as an article of sports memorabilia?


of the athlete on the item as it is being rendered, and is then catalogued and ac-cessible on the company’s database. Thus, items from trusted agencies such as Up-per Deck do command pre-mium prices, due to the fact that buyers and sellers alike have a very reliable “chain of custody” for their items of sports memorabilia.

However, the vast majority of the sports memorabilia market is a murky, “other” place. In most cases, both offline and online, it is a very untrustworthy market, filled with intentionally counter-feited signed sports para-phernalia and fake items that are being bought and sold by mostly unknowing participants.

The impact can be seen in the fact that small, indepen-dent “mom and pop” sports memorabilia stores, once a staple of strip malls across America, are now on the de-cline. According to industry observers, the number of such stores has plummeted from approximately 4,700 a decade ago to just over a thousand today. Much of this decline can be traced to the shifting of buying and selling sports memorabilia to eBay and other major online auction sites, much as has occurred with other collect-ibles, such as coins, stamps and antique items.

As a result of this ease of access and widening of the

marketplace online memo-rabilia sales have literally ‘“exploded”. One can see ev-idence of this by punching in any well-known athlete’s name on eBay, and whether you search for David Beck-ham, Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, or even a lesser-known star, your search will return dozens, even hun-dreds, of autographed items up for sale at any given time. And yet the move to greater online sales has worsened the problem with counter-feit memorabilia. As one law enforcement official de-scribed the situation today, it’s “like the wild, wild west.”

One of the major problems for the whole memorabilia sales and trading process is the Certificate of Authen-ticity that accompanies an item. Ostensibly in place to


veyors of their autographed merchandise. In the United States, the market leaders are companies such as al-lauthentic.com, Mounted Memories, Steiner Sports and Upper Deck.

Let’s look at Upper Deck. This sports marketing agen-cy has multi-million dol-lar contracts with current and former athletes from a whole host of sports, includ-ing basketball (NBA play-ers Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Kareem Abdul-Jab-bar, and Magic Johnson), baseball (Albert Pujols, Ken Griffey Jr., Cal Ripken Jr., San-dy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, and Stan Musial), football (Pey-ton Manning, Tom Brady, Tony Romo, Troy Aikman, John Elway, and Joe Mon-tana), and golf (Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus). Upper Deck is a market leader not just because of its status as the exclusive retailer for these star athletes, but also thanks to its 5-step certifi-cation process that stamps the item with a unique ho-logram and provides the owner with a certificate of authenticity and registration with the Upper Deck data-base. The company is even experimenting with what it calls its PenCam technol-ogy, which provides further authentication assurance by providing a video cap-ture from ‒ you guessed it ‒ a pen equipped with a tiny video camera that immor-talises the actual signature

The mobile handheld

authentication reader/writer

device currently used by Prova

Authenticating the signature

of Eli Manning, the New York

Giants QB and Super Bowl MVP


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provide a potential buyer with the assurance that the item he or she is consider-ing purchasing is a genuine article, today, the effect is almost the opposite. This is because of rampant fraud in the creation of these COAs.

Today, there is no industry standard for the certifica-tion process or for the paper COA itself. Thus, there are a number of problems with these documents.

Some fraudulent memora-bilia sellers create their own fake COAs to accompany their fake items. While there are several reputable third-party certification services, who will analyze an item and its history to determine its

authenticity, there are also disreputable ones, known to certify ‒ in the words of one law enforcement official ‒ “almost anything” to make a quick buck in what is a lu-crative market.

The RFID Solution

What is clearly needed today is a true “chain of custody” capability to authenticate items of sports memorabilia from the athlete’s signature through all future trades of the article. With rampant fraud issues, only exacerbat-ed by both the high dollars attached to many athletes’ items and the accelerating technology that can be used to create both forged articles

and proofs of authenticity, there is certainly a common interest for memorabilia collectors, athletes, sports marketing agencies, and the stores, shows and auctions where the items are bought and sold to develop a fool-proof solution, for lack of a better term.

The leading company today attempting to apply an RFID-based solution to authenti-cating sports memorabilia is the Irving, Texas-based Pro-va Group. Prova is currently marketing its patented Au-tograph Certification System for use at signing events and trade shows.

Daniel Werner, the firm’s Vice President of Market-ing, explains its concept: “We decided early on to cre-ate a system that works at the moment of the signing that would put authentica-tion in a database and lock that information onto an RFID tag.” As such, the tag is applied to the item prior to signing, and then, at the point of signing, the tag is read by and entered into the Prova database, record-ing who, when, and where the autograph took place. Once an item is registered in Prova’s Online Registry, the registered owner is able to print a Certificate of Au-thenticity on demand. More importantly, he can share the tagged item’s complete history ‒ its chain of custody ‒ with interested buyers or other collectors.

The sports memorabilia market needs RFID solutions to help anthenticate items in the present and the future

The entire sports memorabilia market in the U.S., and indeed around the world, is still reeling from the 2001 bust of a major fraud ring. The FBI arrested almost two-dozen individuals, most of which served prison time for their involvement. The enterprise, which operated across more than a dozen states, had expert forgers who could quickly produce entire lots of phony memorabilia. The 2001 raid yielded thousands of fraudulently signed baseballs, jerseys, helmets, photos, and other articles. The damage however, had already been done and continues to this day. In all, the FBI estimates that over $100 million in fake memorabilia was sold through the scheme, much of which is still on the market today. The FBI found that not only could the forgers create knock-offs that could fool even the most knowledgeable sports memorabilia authenticator or collector, they uncovered that the criminals had turned the authentication process to their advantage, being equally adept at falsifying COAs and holograms. While Operation Bullpen was the largest fraud scheme uncovered in the sports memorabilia market to date, criminal arrests continue to plague the industry. The FBI estimates that such fraud makes for over a half a billion dollars in annual losses, keeping the marketplace a very skeptical one.

Operation Bullpen


What’s more, if a collector wishes to add additional sig-natures to an item, such as having an entire champion-ship team autograph a foot-ball or basketball or adding the autograph of a current star ‒ say Tony Romo ‒ to a ball previously signed by a historic quarterback, such as Bart Starr or Joe Namath, the Prova RFID tag can record each separately and provide proof of authenticity for each autograph.

The Prova system makes use of two form factors of high-frequency, 13.56 MHz pas-sive tags for different sized collectibles, the smallest of which measures 1 inch by 1⁄4 inch. Both of the tag forms are supplied by X-ident Technology. The sys-tem has been employed at special events where up to 4,000 items of memorabilia have been authenticated by Prova. And now, the firm is shifting from fixed reader stations to hand-held Sirit readers to enable easier certification, as well as seek-ing ways to minimize the amount of data that has to be input to certify each indi-vidual autograph and thus speed the process.

Bringing trust back

Interjecting RFID into the sports memorabilia mar-ket certainly parallels other auto-ID technological ap-plications, most notably pharmaceuticals and gov-

ernment-issued forms of identification. With both of these applications, there is a significant threat of coun-terfeit items. While there is undoubtedly a far greater threat of personal harm from the use of fake prescription drugs and the presence of phony passports or ID cards than a forged signature of Alex Rodgriquez on a photo or baseball card, RFID has proven to be an effective so-lution in these areas.

Furthermore, the high dol-lars involved means that the ROI potential is significant, as the ratio of the cost of the tag to the value of the item it is affixed to can be quite low. Indeed, with an unau-thenticated item basically being worthless, the need to shift to an auto-ID solution is quite clear.

While the sports memora-bilia industry is highly frag-mented, with large agen-cies and thousands of small sellers and perhaps millions of collectors, a coordinated


strategy is highly unlikely. However, if the major sports marketing agencies choose independently or collective-ly to implement Prova or an-other player’s RFID solution, this would go a long way to-ward making RFID-based au-thentication a reality in the sports memorabilia indus-try. In doing so, an industry best known today for being susceptible to anyone with a box of baseballs, a Sharpie pen and some creativity can restore trust ‒ and value ‒ to its marketplace. and confi-dence to the fan base.

The highest price ever paid for a single piece of sports history was $3,005,000. In 1998, Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals broke Roger Maris’ single-season home run record ‒ by 9 home runs. At auction, Todd MacFarlane, the creator of the Spawn comic book series, had the winning bid for McGwire’s 70th Home Run Ball. In the decade that has passed since this record on-field performance and record sports memorabilia auction, McGwire’s achievement has come under suspicion surrounding his alleged use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs during that season. This has not only tainted McGwire’s record, but diminished the value of MacFarlane’s investment as well. In fact, according to a recent Forbes Magazine article, the McGwire ball is now estimated to be worth approximately a million dollars - a third of its purchase price.

The most expensive piece of sports memorabilia ever

A game-worn Dallas Cowboys

jersey tagged with Prova’s

RFID solution

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