CARDBOARDFILE
basketball / Fleer Stickers
11 cards
Eleven stickers, one to a pack, alongside the twelve base cards and the stick of gum.
They are the same size as the cards - two and a half by three and a half inches - and they carry their own numbering, so Michael Jordan is card 57 in the base set and sticker 8 here. The design is red, white and blue stripes with a band of white stars down the left, a yellow strip holding the name, and the Fleer crown at the top.
There is an arithmetic point about these that is worth setting out first, because it makes the whole set unusually measurable.
A pack held twelve of the 132 base cards and one of the eleven stickers. Twelve of 132 is one eleventh. One of eleven is one eleventh. So every individual base card and every individual sticker came out of the same packs in the same proportion, which means each was produced in the same number.
Nobody knows what that number is. But whatever it was, the Jordan rookie at card 57 and the Jordan sticker at number 8 were made in equal quantity.
What happened afterwards was not equal, and that is the interesting part.
PSA has graded 28,151 copies of the base Jordan and 18,148 of the sticker - ten thousand fewer submissions of a thing produced in identical numbers. And the sticker gems at 0.70 per cent against the base card's 1.19.
The reasons are visible in the object. Stickers were meant to be peeled and stuck to something, and a good many were. The backing is smooth and shiny rather than matte, so it shows handling differently. The gum sat against them in the pack, which is why authentic copies so often carry residue or staining on the back. And PSA's own note on the set says they are fraught with centring problems.
There is also a wrinkle in how the packs were made. The wax was semi-transparent at the back, so a determined buyer in a shop could sometimes work out which sticker was inside before paying for it. Whatever that did to the surviving distribution, it was not random.
The eleven do not behave alike. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at sticker 1 gems at 0.34 per cent, the hardest of the group and half the rate of the Jordan. Alex English at sticker 4 gems at 2.50 per cent, seven times easier than the Kareem, and he is the least famous name on the list.
That ordering has nothing to do with the players and everything to do with where each sticker sat on the sheet and how many people bothered to submit one. Sticker 1 has the same problem as card 1 in every set on this site: it sits at the front.
Across all eleven, PSA has graded 68,057 stickers and awarded 673 tens. Just under one per cent.
The base set that produced them is at 1986-87 Fleer, where the same players can be compared card by card.
These are cheaper than the base cards at every grade and scarcer at the top of most of them, which is an unusual combination.
The Jordan at sticker 8 is the one everybody wants and the one to think hardest about. It has 127 PSA 10s against 335 for the base rookie, from an identical print run, and it sells for a fraction of the price. Whether that gap closes is a judgement about collector preference rather than about the cards.
Away from the Jordan this is an affordable set to complete. Most of the eleven have been graded between three and six thousand times and trade accordingly. A PSA 8 or 9 of any of them is easy to find.
Kareem at sticker 1 is the sleeper. It gems at 0.34 per cent - the hardest of the eleven, half the rate of the Jordan - and it is a Hall of Fame name that nobody chases.
Check the back before you buy raw. Gum residue and staining are common and original to the packs, and they cap the grade. So does any sign the backing has been lifted at a corner.
Expect poor centring and check it on both sides. It is the single most common reason these grade below expectation.
And do not confuse the sticker with the base card. Jordan is sticker 8 and card 57, and the two are different objects at very different prices. The sticker back is smooth and shiny; the base card back is matte.