What is the most expensive sports memorabilia ever sold? Given the boom in sports collectibles in recent years, that answer keeps changing. Over the past decade, on average, a new piece of sports history has taken the title as the priciest every year.
In part, the price surge is because verification methods, such as photo-matching and materials knowledge, has grown so advanced that deep-pocketed investors have more confidence an item is legitimate. Indeed, the world’s most expensive piece of memorabilia—Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot” jersey—probably saw bidding intensified thanks to the assertions of two well-regarded experts who say photo matching and materials knowledge made them confident the jersey was the same the Babe wore 92 autumns ago.
But more fundamentally, the rise in memorabilia values is because sports has knack for creating many vivid, widely known moments of greatness. For many years, baseball dominated the world of sports collectibles—perhaps no surprise as the oldest of the world’s major professional sports. These days it’s no longer just baseball, though it probably accounts for roughly half the high-end sports memorabilia market. Basketball, soccer, boxing and even the Olympics make an appearance in the list of the most valuable collectibles ever sold.
“What you see is a mixture of natural scarcity with the top, game-worn items, combined with iconic moments,” Brahm Wachter, Sotheby’s head of modern collectibles, said. The most valuable items combine something “representative of the athlete and his or her accomplishments with a thing that everybody remembers.”
Here are the current top 10 most expensive sports collectibles:
1932 Babe Ruth ‘Called Shot’ jersey – $24.1 million
One of the most iconic athletes sports has produced is also the king of the collectibles. The 1932 World Series between the American League champion Yankees and the National League pennant-winning Cubs was heated, as bad blood boiled between the teams and fans of the North Siders jeered Ruth relentlessly. As legend (and a recorded Lou Gehrig interview) asserts, the Babe stepped out of the batter’s box during a mid-game at-bat to respond to hecklers from the Cubs dugout. Pointing to the center field flagpole at Wrigley Field, he stepped back into the box and hammered the next pitch some 490 feet to dead center. It’s probably the most famous moment of Ruth’s career—it vaulted the Yankees to victory in the game and a sweep of the Cubs, and it was his last appearance in the Fall Classic. It sold for $940,000 in 2005 and then set its record $24.12 million sale price in the summer of 2024.
1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card – $12.6 million
This mint condition card of the Hall of Famer sold at auction in August 2022 for more than double the prior record price.
“Mantle is a bit of a perfect storm. He was a rookie in 1951, so a lot of Baby Boomers were able to see him play,” said Chris Ivy, director of sports collectibles at Heritage Auctions, which sold the card. “The Yankees were dominant his first 10 years in the league going to the World Series eight times, and he’s larger than life, like Babe Ruth.”
The card itself has transcended mere collectible into being a pop culture icon, adding to the appeal of owning a rare example of a near-perfect trading card.
1998 Michael Jordan NBA Finals Chicago Bulls jersey – $10.1 million
Jordan’s jersey ranks near the very top of expensive sports collectibles for many of the same reasons as Mantle’s card. Jordan was the greatest player in the NBA at the time, and arguably of all time. The 1997-98 season run to the Bulls’ last NBA title was featured in the popular ESPN documentary The Last Dance in 2020, which highlighted Jordan’s fifth (and final) MVP season before he shockingly retired from basketball. Sotheby’s sold the jersey for $10.1 million in September 2022. Perhaps amazingly for a record-setting piece of game-worn clothing, Jordan wore this particular shirt in Game 1, a loss.
Diego Maradona “Hand of God” jersey – $9.3 million
Maradona wore the famed “Hand of God” jersey in the quarterfinals of the 1986 soccer World Cup, using his hand, unseen by the referee, to score in the first half. A remarkable follow-up came in the second half of the match, when he dribbled half the length of the field, eluding six defenders to score what many consider the greatest goal of the 20th century.
“It is such a famous and iconic moment in the history of the sport,” said Wachter. Sotheby’s sold the jersey for $9.3 million in 2022, less than two years after the all-time great Argentine died.
The Olympic Games Manifesto – $8.8 million
This original, hand-written manuscript by Pierre du Coubertin details his vision for sports to serve as a means to greater peace and understanding among the peoples of the world. Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee two years after writing the manifesto in 1892. This rarely seen original document was gaveled at auction by Sotheby’s in December 2022. History buffs find it hard to overstate the importance of the 14-page document: Coubertin’s vision stands as the ideal for sportsmanship and peaceful competition to benefit both individual athletes and their countries.
Lionel Messi set of six 2022 World Cup match-worn shirts – $7.8 million
The great Argentine player starred in the 2022 World Cup captaining his country to its first title since Maradona’s 1986 team. Messi wore this set of six jerseys in the first halves of games in group play, the semifinals and final, scoring four goals in them. Sold by Sotheby’s in December 2023, the shirts are seen as the culmination of Messi’s remarkable international and club-playing career, even as he continues to star in MLS. In a sign of big money getting into collectibles, the jerseys were put up for auction by a venture backed in part by billionaire Steve Cohen.
Honus Wagner T-206 Baseball card – $7.25 million
This rare card of Hall of Famer Honus Wagner was long synonymous with the most expensive sports collectible. That’s because the clean-living Wagner had the cards stopped in 1911 when he saw they featured an ad on the back for cigarettes. Goldin Auctions brokered the record-setting private-party sale of a fine example of the card in 2022. It’s known as T-206 because only 206 of the baseball trading cards were ever printed and just 50 are thought to exist today. It’s believed this is just the second sale of one of the Wagner cards in the past 18 years.
1914 Babe Ruth rookie card – $7.2 million
Babe Ruth is renowned as baseball’s greatest player of his era and probably the most important baseball player ever, establishing the home run as the headline thrill of the game and helping make the Yankees sports’ most famous team. But it’s not the Red Sox or Yankees uniform The Babe wears on this card. Instead, it’s his one season hurling for the Baltimore Orioles, then a minor league team. The card is scarce too: probably just 10 exist. This card sold for $7.2 million in 2023 through Robert Edward Auctions, two years after shares in it were sold at a valuation of $6 million.
Muhammad Ali “Rumble in the Jungle” belt – $6.2 million
Perhaps boxing’s most famous moment, starring its most famous fighter. Muhammed Ali and George Foreman squared off in Zaire in 1974 with the world heavyweight title at stake. Contrary to what you might think today, Ali was universally considered an underdog against the fearsome, brooding Foreman, the same lovable marketer of home grills 20 years later. In Africa, Ali let Foreman throw lots of punches early, correctly thinking it would tire out the overconfident title holder. Ali then scored a knockout of Foreman in the eighth round. NFL owner Jim Irsay won the title belt at a 2022 Heritage Auctions bidding war.
Kobe Bryant 2007-2008 Lakers jersey – $5.8 million
The all-time leading scorer in the vaunted history of the L.A. Lakers, Bryant wore this gold-colored jersey for 25 games of his only MVP season. It’s rare for a game-worn item to be so frequently used – Bryant scored 645 of that season’s 2,452 points in the shirt, including the post-season run to the NBA title. In addition to its game usage, verified by extensive photo-matching, it also sports Bryant’s autograph. Plus the jersey is worn in some of the most iconic photos of Bryant, who died in a 2020 helicopter accident. Like many auctions, the buyer and seller are anonymous. Sotheby’s conducted the 2023 sale.
(This story was originally published on Jan. 12, 2024, and it was updated on Aug. 26, 2024 after Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot” jersey sold for $24.1 million in August 2024.)
