An altered Jordan rookie sold Sunday for $4,999.99

A PSA 5 copy of the identical 1986 Fleer #57 sold the same day for $9,999.00.

A 1986-87 Fleer #57 Michael Jordan rookie in a Beckett holder marked AUTHENTIC / ALTERED — a designation that carries no numeric grade at all — sold Sunday for $4,999.99 at a fixed price with zero bids. It was the most notable Jordan card sale of the day, and it was not the biggest.

Why it matters

The 1986-87 Fleer #57 is the hobby’s benchmark Jordan rookie, and Sunday put two copies of it on the board in the same session: one Beckett would not assign a number to, one PSA graded EX 5. Both prices are below, from the same day and the same listing format, which is a cleaner comparison than any comp pool we could assemble for this card.

By the numbers

• $4,999.99 — the altered copy. Fixed price, zero bids, no best offer, so it is a confirmed paid price.
• $9,999.00 — the PSA 5 copy. Also fixed price with zero bids, and the highest confirmed Jordan price of the day.
• 58 sales, $515.12 median — Sunday’s qualifying single-card volume.

Zoom in

Beckett’s AUTHENTIC / ALTERED designation is not a grade. It certifies the card is a genuine 1986-87 Fleer #57 that has been physically modified, and the holder carries no number. The seller’s own title calls the card faded. At $4,999.99, the buyer took on a real Jordan rookie with a permanent disclosure attached to it.

Reality check

Two sales are not a trend, and neither had an auction behind it — both closed at a fixed price with zero bids, so each figure was set by one seller and accepted by one buyer. Sunday’s real bidding contest was elsewhere: a raw 1987-88 Fleer #59 second-year card drew 43 bids, the most of any Jordan card that day, and closed at $565.00.

What's next

22 of Sunday’s 58 qualifying sales were accepted best offers, where eBay publishes the seller’s ask and never the settled figure — $34,559.32 of listed value that cannot be confirmed as money anybody paid, the same trap that sat on top of Saturday’s session. The 36 confirmed paid sales came to $33,671.29. Watch for a third fixed-price Fleer #57 to close this week; two prices this far apart on one day do not settle where the card trades.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, filtering out multi-card lots, reprints, and cross-listed items to isolate genuine single-card sales. Prices are final sold prices. Sunday’s figures come from 58 qualifying single-card sales, enumerated twice and independently corroborated by a separate 90-day query that returned the same 58 items. No comparable-sale multiple is quoted in this article: the 24-sale baseline pool for a 1986 Fleer #57 ran from $2,999.00 to $28,000.00 around a $7,203.00 median, which is several grades stacked into one number rather than a like-for-like benchmark. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.