Published August 24, 2025 | By Alyx E, Founder of Collectors MD

I feel fortunate to have arrived in the beautiful country of Spain today for a long-awaited trip with my wife and in-laws. This place will always hold a special place in my heart—I studied abroad here back in the spring of 2011. Coming back now feels surreal, stirring memories from a very different chapter of life.

But as I look around, one thing is undeniable: a lot has changed.

Maybe I’m jaded, maybe I’m biased—but in just 24 hours in Barcelona, what I’ve seen from a consumer’s standpoint feels eerily familiar. It’s a mirror of what we’re living through in the States. And it validates a hard truth I wrote about yesterday (Pandemic Within A Pandemic): we are in the midst of a “hypebeast” pandemic—and it’s not just confined to one country.

Take Lamine Yamal—the 18-year-old Spanish soccer phenom and rising global superstar for FC Barcelona. He is everywhere. You look up, there he is. You look down, there he is. Left, right, diagonal—his face, his name, his likeness. Jerseys. T-shirts. Hats. Posters. Signature shoes. And of course—sports cards.

Lamine Yamal, freshly 18, already plastered across billboards—the face of a sport, a culture, a country. Proof of how the machine exploits kids before they’re even of age.

On one hand, it’s what we’ve always done in modern sports culture: celebrate our heroes, immortalize greatness, pass fandom through memorabilia. But what I’m seeing here isn’t just celebration—it’s exploitation. A barely-18-year-old kid, pushed on consumers in every imaginable format—and exploited since his early teens at the junior level. Not for what he’s accomplished, but for what he might become. Every jersey sold, every bet placed, every pack ripped only fuels the cycle.

This isn’t just a marketing problem. It’s a mental health problem.

• It feeds addiction in the hobby. Kids and adults alike chase the next “must-have” card of Yamal, driving spending sprees that rarely end well.

• It fuels sports gambling. The louder the hype machine gets, the more money pours in: parlays on his next goal, props on every touch of the ball. And let’s not forget—this kid only just turned 18 last month. Yet the sportsbooks are already salivating, squeezing every ounce of profit they can from his name.

• It fuels unrealistic expectations. When one player’s image saturates the culture, it conditions fans and collectors to constantly crave “the next big thing”.

At Collectors MD, we often talk about dopamine loops—the highs, the chases, and the way each “hit” resets the bar higher and higher. Meanwhile, our brain’s baseline depletes, making it harder and harder to ever feel satisfied as the cycle unravels.

Barcelona right now feels like a case study in how industries and cultures—sports, fashion, collectibles, and gambling—are converging to squeeze every ounce of attention and money from consumers. And the scary part? It’s working exactly as it was designed to.

And this is just one of countless case studies. It’s happening across every corner of pop culture—sports, music, Hollywood—where fresh young faces are packaged by the media as the next “must-have” chase or investment, commodified before their eighteenth birthday. But these aren’t crypto coins or stock symbols. They’re real-life human beings—some not even old enough to drive a car. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what this does to their mental health—let alone what it’s doing to ours.

And to be clear, we’re not trying to be cynical—we’re just deeply concerned, and we have to be realistic about what is going on out there.

This is why our work matters. If a hype-driven pandemic can reach across oceans, then so can our message. We can’t stop or slow down the hype machine, but we can equip people to step back, recognize the cycle, and protect themselves from being consumed by it.

Because at the end of the day, if we don’t pause, reflect, and reclaim our clarity, we risk becoming commodities ourselves—consumed by the very systems we once believed we were simply participating in.

#CollectorsMD
The “hypebeast” pandemic may be global, but so is the fight for intention and control.

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