Michael Jordan extends Upper Deck deal as the card maker's first Legacy Partner

Michael Jordan has extended his exclusive partnership with Upper Deck, becoming the first Legacy Partner in the trading card company's history and prolonging a commercial relationship that has already run 35 years.

The announcement came Tuesday night at Nike's House of Innovation in Manhattan, at an event the company had trailed as one of the biggest in its 38-year existence. Neither side disclosed the financial terms or the length of the extension.

Under the arrangement, Upper Deck stays the sole producer of authenticated trading cards, collectibles and memorabilia carrying Jordan's image and autograph, an exclusivity that has held since 1991 and that helped build the modern sports collectibles business.

Jordan said he was proud to be the company's first Legacy Partner, adding that three decades of work together had been about making cards and memorabilia collectors could not find anywhere else.

The centrepiece of the announcement is unusual. Jordan signed 23 factory-sealed 1986-87 Fleer Basketball packs, bought back off the secondary market, which will be inserted as redemptions across every version of Upper Deck's 2026 Goodwin Champions release. One of the 23 carries a one-of-one inscription reading "Rookie Pack." Jason Masherah, the company's president, made a point at the press conference of stressing that there are 23 of them, not a single trophy piece.

The number is not accidental, and neither is the timing. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Jordan's Fleer rookie card, still the most coveted basketball card ever printed. Goodwin Champions reaches hobby shops on July 9 and general retail on July 22.

Upper Deck wrapped the launch in a campaign called "You Don't Trade Greatness, You Keep it for a Lifetime," a deliberate echo of the "Trade Jordan" billboard it ran in 1992, when the company was ascendant and the card market was booming.

A new run of Upper Deck Authenticated memorabilia accompanies the cards, spanning Jordan's basketball and baseball careers. One piece, titled "On the Diamond," is built around a photograph from the 1993 Upper Deck Celebrity Home Run Challenge. Prequalification for an auction of the collection opened Wednesday, with bidding running from July 30 to Aug. 9. Upper Deck said 10 percent of the proceeds will go to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

The commercial logic is straightforward for the card maker. Upper Deck lost its NBA licence years ago and has kept a foothold in basketball largely by retaining Jordan, using college and portrait photography as the backdrop for his signature. He is the company's anchor asset rather than one name among many.

Scarcity is the other half of the model. Successive Upper Deck deals have capped the number of autographs Jordan signs, which props up prices in a market where his material already commands extraordinary sums. A 2007-08 dual logoman card autographed by Jordan and Kobe Bryant became the highest-selling sports card in history.

The extension does little to alter the shape of Jordan's fortune, which Forbes puts at $4.3 billion, making him the wealthiest retired athlete on the planet by a wide margin. Most of it traces to a contract he signed in 1984, when Nike paid him $500,000 a year plus royalties rather than the flat fee it first proposed. He now collects roughly 5 percent of Jordan Brand sales, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, against the $94 million in salary he earned across 15 NBA seasons.

His second-largest windfall came from ownership. Jordan sold his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets in 2023 at a valuation near $3 billion, holding on to a minority position, and the sale made him the first professional athlete to appear on Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans.

He has spread the proceeds around since. Jordan co-founded 23XI Racing with the driver Denny Hamlin in 2020, became an investor and adviser at DraftKings the same year, co-founded Cincoro Tequila in 2019 and owns a chain of steakhouses in Chicago, New York and Washington.

The racing venture has had a loud year. 23XI settled its antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR in December, clearing the legal air, and Tyler Reddick then opened the 2026 Cup Series season with three consecutive victories, starting with the Daytona 500 and becoming the first driver to manage that in the series' 78-year history. The team held the top two positions in the championship standings through the opening races. Bubba Wallace drives its other car.

Card and memorabilia rights sit well down the list of what generates Jordan's income. The Upper Deck deal matters anyway, because it protects the machinery that keeps his name earning more than two decades after he last played, and because it explains why a piece of cardboard printed in 1986 is still making news in 2026.