IMPORTANT INFO

If you are serious about collecting professional championship rings, it will help if you understand some important issues.

WHY DOES THIS MARKET EXISTS?

You might be asking: How is it that there are so many rings being bought and sold? Would players not want to hold onto these valuable mementos? These are fair questions.

More than 90% of rings that end up on the open market are sold because of financial stresses on the player or their family members. The sad reality is that many players struggle financially after their retirement. The selling of these rings is a way to help them with their problems.

The other 10% are sold for a variety of reasons. For example:

• a player gets a ring but he has only played less than one season with the team and does not have a strong connection to the team
• a player may have multiple rings and may want to get rid of rings that don't mean as much to him.
• etc.

AUCTION HOUSES.

You have the option of buying or selling your ring through an auction house.

Please be careful:

• Auction houses take as much as 40% of the sales amount the product got sold for.
• They are interested in hiking the price up as much as possible which includes the use of ghost bidders to do this.
• They sell hundreds of different of products and as such have limited, in depth knowledge about championship rings themselves. Our collectors have seen many rings misrepresented at auction houses. Even when they were told about the misrepresentation, they did nothing about it.

One of the main reasons this website has been set up is to shine light on the deficiencies of what is going on at the auction houses.

LETTERS OF AUTHENTICITY

Today it is common for buyers to ask for “letters of authenticity”.

One major collector says “these are not worth the paper they are written on”. Why? Here are examples of letters seen that mis-represent the ring in question:

• It is written by “an independent expert” who in fact has very little knowledge on the ring. The letter typically starts with the disclaimer “in my opinion”. Anyone can have any opinion.
• The letter is written by a player or a family member. Some of these are quite legitimate but we have also seen many where the ring is misrepresented in order to get the maximum price for the ring. Remember that the majority of rings sold by players or their families are sold due to financial stresses.