Nine cards, a blue Sharpie, and a golf course in Florida

The reason signed ones barely existed is contractual. Jordan has signed exclusively for Upper Deck for decades, and the 1986-87 Fleer rookie is not an Upper Deck card. So for most of the period in which that card became the most famous piece of cardboard in basketball, getting his signature onto one was simply not something the market could arrange.

There was one exception, and it only happened because Upper Deck bought Fleer in 2005. For the 2006-07 Fleer set, Upper Deck went out and bought twenty-three well preserved Jordan rookies off the open market, had him sign them on-card in front of witnesses, numbered them 1 to 23 in blue ink at the lower right of the image, and seeded redemption cards into hobby boxes.

Twenty-three cards. For eighteen years, that was the entire supply. Only fourteen of them have ever surfaced.

Then, in 2024, he signed nine more

Not for a card company. For a private collector.

Jordan signed nine 1986-87 Fleer rookie cards in blue Sharpie at his private golf course in Florida, in private, with witnesses present. No redemption cards, no product, no manufacturer. Just nine cards and a pen.

PSA graded all nine. Three came back as PSA 9s. Six came back as PSA 10s, and as of late 2025 not one of those six had been offered publicly.

In hobby language these are aftermarket signatures - added to a card after it left the factory, authenticated afterwards by a third party rather than witnessed by the company that made it. That is the category the hobby has historically treated with the most suspicion.

What the three PSA 9s have done

The June sale was the debut sports card auction for Joopiter, the auction house Pharrell Williams founded in 2022. It made $2.5 million including a 25 per cent buyer's premium, which means the hammer was $2 million and the rest is fees - worth knowing, because the headline number and what the bidding actually reached are different figures.

Four months later Goldin sold a second one, privately, for $2.7 million. Ken Goldin confirmed to ESPN that this was a different card, not a flip of the Joopiter one. It is the highest price ever paid for any trading card carrying an aftermarket signature.

For comparison: the most anyone has ever paid for an unsigned 1986 Fleer Jordan rookie is $840,000, in 2021. The signature is worth more than twice the card.

The bit that should interest you

The hobby has a hierarchy of autographs, and it runs roughly like this. Best is on-card, signed under the manufacturer's own witness and released in their product - full chain of custody, nobody has to take anyone's word for anything. Below that is a sticker autograph. Below that, aftermarket - signed privately at some point after release, sent to an authenticator, certified on their opinion.

By that hierarchy the 2006 buybacks should be the premium item. They are numbered, they came with an Upper Deck certificate, they were signed under the company's own supervision, and there are only twenty-three.

They are not the premium item. The best public result for a buyback is $1,204,750, in August 2026. The aftermarket cards have done $2.5 million and $2.7 million.

Some of that is the card underneath - a PSA 9 body beats a BGS 8.5, and nine is fewer than twenty-three. But not all of it. What those two sales say is that when the authentication is solid enough, buyers stop caring who was standing in the room.

And the authentication here is about as solid as aftermarket gets: signed in person, witnessed, submitted to PSA, autograph graded 10. That is a long way from a signature that turns up on a card with a certificate of unknown origin. The category is broad, and the top of it is now setting records.

What happens when a 10 sells

Six of the nine graded PSA 10, and none of them has been offered.

Two PSA 9s from the same signing have sold at $2.5 million and $2.7 million. If a PSA 10 with the same autograph grade reaches the block, there is no obvious ceiling to point at, because the comparables all sit below it.

Two things to hold on to before anyone gets carried away. The Goldin sale was private, meaning the price is reported by the house rather than established by open bidding in public - that is normal at this level and it is not the same evidence as an auction result. And the whole story rests on five public data points across a population of thirty-two cards. That is a thin market by any measure, and thin markets move violently. One of the 2006 buybacks sold for $1,008,000 at Christie's in June 2022 and $264,000 at Heritage fourteen months later, same card, same slab.

The direction is clear enough. The precision is not.

Every signer on this index shows what is listed and what has verifiably sold, broken out by who certified it, and you can read how we work the numbers out.