Michael Jordan's 'Last Dance' jersey sells for record $12.26 million

A Chicago Bulls jersey that Michael Jordan wore in Game 3 of the 1998 NBA Finals sold at auction on Tuesday for $12.26 million, the highest price ever paid for a basketball jersey.

The sale was run by Joopiter, the online auction house owned by musician and producer Pharrell Williams, who is also the men's creative director at Louis Vuitton. The buyer was not identified.

The white home jersey, with Jordan's No. 23, comes from his final season with the Bulls, the 1997-98 campaign that ESPN and Netflix chronicled in the 2020 documentary series "The Last Dance." Joopiter said it is the only publicly known white jersey from a Bulls win in the 1998 Finals to have been offered for sale.

The game itself was one of the most one-sided in Finals history. Playing at home in Chicago on June 7, 1998, the Bulls beat the Utah Jazz 96-54, taking a 2-1 lead in the series. Jordan went on to lead the team to its sixth championship in eight seasons, and it was the last title he won with Chicago.

Caitlin Donovan, Joopiter's global head of sales, described the jersey before the auction closed as the kind of object collectors wait a lifetime for.

The result breaks a record that another Jordan jersey from the same Finals had held. In 2022, the red jersey he wore in Game 1, which the Bulls lost, sold for $10.1 million, more than twice its estimate. A year earlier, a jersey from Jordan's sophomore season at the University of North Carolina had fetched $1.38 million, a record at the time.

Jordan's jersey still falls well short of the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia ever sold. That record belongs to Babe Ruth's "Called Shot" jersey from Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, which sold for $24.12 million in 2024.

The price is the latest sign of how strongly the market for Jordan items has held up more than two decades after his last game. Buyers on eBay have spent more than $115 million on Jordan trading cards so far this year, according to Gemrate, a site that tracks card grading and sales. That is more than any other current or former NBA player and trails only Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani among all athletes.

Jordan's own fortune has grown far faster than the value of his game-worn gear. He earned far more from his partnership with Nike and the Jordan Brand than he did in salary during his playing career, and he became a billionaire largely on those royalties and on the value of his stake in the Charlotte Hornets. He sold his majority stake in the team in 2023.

Top-tier sports memorabilia has increasingly been treated as a trophy asset by wealthy collectors in recent years, alongside art, watches and classic cars. Game-worn items tied to a specific, famous moment command the largest premiums, and few moments in basketball carry more weight than Jordan's final run with the Bulls.