A 1997-98 Metal Universe Precious Metal Gems Red Michael Jordan sold for $1,473,989 through Alt, and the marketplace called it the most expensive PMG card ever sold at auction, regardless of player or year. That is a precise claim, and the precision is the story — it is a record for one of the hobby's most fragile card lines, not a record for Jordan, whose cards have gone for nearly nine times as much.

What Sold

The card is No. 052/100, graded BGS 8. The $1,473,989 figure is the final total including buyer's premium. Sports Illustrated tracked the auction as it closed: with two days left and 19 bids in, it already stood at $962,502.

Alt listed a Beckett population of 11 at that grade. A BGS 8 sounds unremarkable next to the PSA 10s that headline most seven-figure sales, and with this set that instinct is wrong.

Why an 8 Is a High Grade Here

The original PMG issue was not built like a modern parallel that happens to carry an /100 stamp. Per PSA, every card in the 1997-98 Metal Universe PMG set was numbered to 100 — but the first 10 copies got green foil and the remaining 90 got red. That makes Jordan's Red PMG effectively a 90-card run, with the Green representing the extraordinarily scarce first ten.

PSA also notes the foil has a tendency to flake and chip. The supply problem is therefore doubled: a print run measured in dozens, on a surface that degrades on its own. Surviving copies did not merely have to be pulled and kept — they had to survive nearly three decades without the foil giving up. That is what a BGS 8 means on this card, and it is why the condition math here does not resemble the rest of the market.

The Price History

Card Ladder's record of the same card in the same grade, as reported by Sports Illustrated, makes the jump legible:

  • June 1, 2024 — a BGS 8 (No. 096/100) sold on Goldin for $298,900 across 20 bids
  • December 6, 2025 — a BGS 8.5, a higher grade, sold on Goldin for $651,333.60 across 46 bids
  • March 7, 2026 — a PSA 5 (No. 060/100) sold on Goldin for $640,500, per Heavy
  • August 2026 — this BGS 8 closed at $1,473,989

The new result is roughly five times the last comparable BGS 8 sale twenty-six months earlier, and it cleared the last sale of a better-graded copy by more than $800,000. Sports Illustrated notes that the 2024 copy actually carried better subgrades everywhere except the surface.

Analysis: Grades this far apart make dollar-for-dollar comparison imperfect, and none of these sales is a like-for-like repeat. What the sequence does show is a market pricing survival rather than perfection. A PSA 5 bringing $640,500 in March and a BGS 8 bringing $1.47 million in August describe the same behaviour: when a set has no meaningful population at the top, buyers move down the grade scale rather than wait for a gem that may not exist. That is our reading of the sales record, not a conclusion drawn by any of the sources.

The Jordan Frame

The 1997-98 season ended with Jordan's sixth championship and his last title with the Bulls, which is the association doing work in the price. Heavy is explicit that the sale does not make this the most expensive Jordan card ever — in August 2025 a one-of-one 2007-08 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection Dual Logoman Autographs card of Jordan and Kobe Bryant sold through Heritage Auctions for $12.932 million, the record for a sports card at the time.

The Red PMG has no autograph, no Logoman patch and no one-of-one designation. It is a base-set parallel from an era before those features defined the top of the market, which is precisely what makes a seven-figure result for it notable rather than routine. This blog's very first case file, CASE #0001, flagged a Kobe Bryant PMG Green among the landmark sales of the current market — the same set, the ten-copy tier above this one.

Verdict: a record worth stating exactly. The most expensive PMG ever sold at auction, on a card that had to survive its own foil to get here.

Confidence note: the $1,473,989 result, the No. 052/100 serial, the BGS 8 grade, Alt's record claim, the Beckett population of 11, the PSA details on green-versus-red foil and foil flaking, the March 2026 PSA 5 sale and the $12.932 million Heritage Logoman comparison are reported by Heavy (Erik C. Anderson, August 19, 2026). The in-auction bidding figure, the June 2024 and December 2025 Goldin comparables and the subgrade detail are reported by Sports Illustrated (Cole Benz, August 19, 2026), citing Card Ladder. Passages marked Analysis are this blog's interpretation, not findings in either source.