A one-of-one Macklin Celebrini rookie card sold for $1,281,000 at Goldin's Elite Auction #7, which closed on August 16. Sports Illustrated reports it is now the highest-selling non-Wayne Gretzky hockey card of all time.

The card is a 2024-25 Upper Deck Young Guns Outburst Gold #451, serial-numbered 1/1 and graded PSA Authentic. SI reports the $1,281,000 figure is the total paid with buyer's premium included, and that bidding crossed both the $500,000 and $1,000,000 marks on the auction's closing day. It was the highest-selling card in the entire Goldin Elite Auction, and the only card to pass seven figures anywhere in the week's public sales.

The Record It Broke

The previous non-Gretzky mark belonged to a BGS 8 2005-06 Upper Deck The Cup Alexander Ovechkin Rookie Patches Autograph Gold Rainbow, numbered 8/8 with an on-card autograph. It sold for $381,000 on April 21, 2025.

SI reports that the sale moves Celebrini past Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid and Ovechkin, and that hockey now has two players with cards above the million-dollar mark.

Analysis: The size of the jump is the part worth sitting with. Records in this hobby usually advance in increments — a new high clears the old one by a few percent, sometimes by half. This one cleared it by 3.4 times. A category record that triples in a single lot is not a market grinding upward; it is a market discovering that it had no idea what the ceiling was. That is the blog's reading of the two figures, not a finding in SI's reporting.

A Seven-Figure Card With No Number On It

The Celebrini is graded PSA Authentic — a designation confirming the card is genuine and unaltered, without assigning a numeric condition grade.

Analysis: For a card this new, that is unusual company for this price bracket. The 2005-06 Ovechkin it displaced carries a BGS 8 with a 10 autograph. Buyers at the top of the modern market are increasingly paying for the fact that a card is the only one, and treating condition as a secondary question — but no source has quantified that shift, and one lot does not establish it.

What Else Moved In The Same Auction

  • Shohei Ohtani — a 1/1 Gold Topps All Kings insert, PSA 6, sold for $207,400 with buyer's premium after drawing a single bid on the final day. SI reports it as the most expensive sale of an All Kings or All Aces insert.
  • Lamine Yamal — a 2026 Panini Prizm World Cup '26 Black Shimmer Prizm #70, numbered 1/1 and graded PSA NM-MT 8, took the top soccer slot at $212,280. Seven soccer cards cleared $50,000.
  • Kobe Bryant — five Bryant cards and a photo-matched, game-worn final-season jersey all finished inside the top ten items sold. The five cards totaled $1,911,741; the jersey brought $292,800.

The Scope Of The Claim

This is a category record, and the category matters. Gretzky's cards still sit above it — SI's framing throughout is "behind Wayne Gretzky," not an outright hockey record. Anyone repeating this sale as "the most expensive hockey card ever" is repeating something no source said.

The blog has tracked this market's edges before: Jack Hughes and the post-Olympics surge in U.S. hockey cards (CASE #0156), Josh Allen's $1.7 million private National Treasures sale (CASE #0232), Ohtani's $3.365 million Bowman superfractor (CASE #0171), and Cavan Sullivan's MLS auction record at this same house (CASE #0208). What separates the Celebrini is that it is a public auction result in a sport that had exactly one name at this altitude.

Verdict: a genuine category record, cleanly sourced and correctly scoped — and a reminder that "non-Gretzky" is doing real work in that sentence.

Sourcing: Sale price, card identity, grade, auction and closing date, the prior non-Gretzky record and its April 21, 2025 date, and all secondary auction results are reported by Sports Illustrated (si.com/collectibles), from two articles published August 17, 2026. Passages labeled "Analysis" are the blog's interpretation of those figures, not findings in the source.