2021 has been a year of record-setting football rookie card sales. Out of the top 10 most expensive sports cards ever sold, football now claims 2 spots on that list. Football is traditionally viewed as a smaller market in the hobby, but that’s starting to change.
Below is a list of the top 25 most valuable rookie cards that includes data from the most recent record sales.
Disclaimer: The football card market is moving fast, so I’ve opted to use predicted price values to develop this list of most valuable rookie cards. There are some cards on this list that haven’t sold in 1+ years due to their rarity, but the lower graded copies of these cards have gone up in value, thus it is anticipated that higher grade copies would have increased as well. The projected values come from Cardladder, which has a detailed white paper on how they derive predicted market value here. Cardladder has developed indexes for particular players to evaluate their market as a whole to help us better understand what certain cards would fetch in the market today. Keep in mind, predictive analysis isn’t 100% accurate, but can still act as guiding data for today’s current market.