Michael Jordan is the largest single name in the card market, and almost nothing that sells under his name is the card most people picture. This is what our daily record of public completed card sales shows, counted between 25 May and 23 August 2026.
Over the fortnight from 10 to 23 August 2026 we counted 63,981 Michael Jordan sales out of 4,615,187 card sales of every kind. That is 138.6 out of every 10,000 sales, or one in 72, or about 4,570 a day, twenty three years after he last played. Over the same fortnight the ten retired NFL names we track sold 46,905 cards between them, so Jordan on his own outsold Tom Brady, Jerry Rice, Joe Montana, Barry Sanders, Walter Payton, Dan Marino, Brett Favre, Peyton Manning, Emmitt Smith and Lawrence Taylor put together, by more than a third.
Four out of five of those sales are cards printed in the 1990s: 80.8% of them, against 6.8% from the 1980s, 6.8% from the 2000s, 1.7% from the 2020s and 0.8% from the 2010s. Cards printed in the last sixteen years are 2.5% of his market.
The 1986-87 Fleer rookie is famous and rarely sold. 482 of 63,120 single-card Jordan sales printed 1986 in the listing, which is 0.8%; allowing listings that write 86 without the century takes it to 1.0%, and requiring an explicit card number 57 takes it down to 0.2%. So between 1 in 100 and 1 in 600, depending on how loosely the listing text is matched.
The most-sold single Jordan card in that fortnight was the 1990-91 Fleer #26 at 1,010 sales, then the 1989-90 Hoops #200 at 632, the 1990-91 SkyBox #41 at 557 and the 1995-96 SkyBox #278 at 536. The 1986-87 Fleer #57 was 105. The counting rule matters and is published with the counts: single-card listings that print a year, a brand and a card number. Counted as year and brand only, it is 1990-91 Fleer at 1,498 against 1986-87 Fleer at 368, and the order is unchanged.
No single card is 2% of his sales and no product line is 6%. The largest is 1998-99 Upper Deck at 5.95%. His sales are also about twice as likely to be graded as the market's: 23.2% of Jordan listings named a grading company, against 10.85% of all card sales in the same fortnight.
His share of all card sales sat at about 102 out of every 10,000 for the seven weeks from 25 May to 12 July 2026, then about 137 for the five weeks from 20 July to 23 August. That is up about a third. Among the eleven retired NBA players we track he was seventh: Shaquille O'Neal moved 3.22 times, Tim Duncan 2.38, Hakeem Olajuwon 1.84, Allen Iverson 1.60, Kevin Garnett 1.54, Scottie Pippen 1.50, Michael Jordan 1.38, Charles Barkley 1.23, Kobe Bryant 1.14, Magic Johnson 1.03 and Larry Bird 1.00. The week of 13 July is not counted at all, because a day was missing from our record and a missing day makes every share in that week read high.
The window closes on 23 August 2026 because our daily record of completed sales got much smaller on 25 August and stayed smaller, falling from roughly 350,000 sales a day to between 45,000 and 78,000. The sales still arriving are not a fair sample of the ones that stopped: listings naming a grading company went from 11.3% to 17.8% of what we see, and listings printing a year between the 1950s and the 1990s went from 15.3% to 28.1%. Counting across that day would report that older cards became more popular when what changed is what we can count.
This is a record of what sold in a stated window, not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Card values are estimates computed from public sold-listing data, not appraisals, offers, or investment advice.