Autographs Are Not What Makes a Card Scarce

A Cooper Flagg autograph sold for $366,000 at Goldin in March 2026, but the price investors pay for the finished card has little connection to what Flagg was paid to sign it. His pay was set upstream, through licensing and his own Fanatics deal. Topps then decided which products would carry the signature, how many versions to make, which would be numbered and which would be a one-of-one. By the time a card reaches the secondary market, Flagg has already been paid.¹²

A specific Flagg card can be scarce. His signature is expensive and exclusive, but he can sign 5,000 cards this year and thousands more next year.

Topps put Flagg rookie autographs in at least six 2025-26 products: Topps Chrome, Chrome Update, Chrome Sapphire, Cosmic Chrome, Chrome Black and Signature Class.³ The base on-card auto from Topps Chrome still sold for around $1,640 in September, up from around $1,440 in July.⁴

Players get paid for autographs through their own deals

There are two basic layers of player compensation in licensed sports cards. The first is group licensing, where the players' associations license names and likenesses across a whole roster so a manufacturer can make an official league product without a separate deal with every player. The formulas differ by sport. Players share a licensing pool for the product, with no royalty each time one player's card is printed.⁵

The second layer is the player's own deal. Stars, top rookies and good signers negotiate directly with a manufacturer for autographs, memorabilia, exclusivity, appearances and marketing. Those deals can pay far more than a player's share of the licensing pool.

Marvin Harrison Jr.'s dispute with Fanatics showed what one of these deals looks like. A term sheet made public in the litigation in July 2024 guaranteed him $800,000 in cash and $250,000 in Fanatics equity. In return he owed at least 35,000 autographs plus jerseys, appearances and social posts. The sheet set the fee at $30 per autograph and $10 per inscription, plus bonuses.⁶

Fanatics bought a broader relationship with Harrison and counted part of the signing work in units at $30 each. The guarantee, equity, memorabilia and marketing carry their own value. The autographs are just one part of the package.

Cooper Flagg signed an exclusive, multi-year trading card and memorabilia agreement with Fanatics while he was still at Duke. The financial terms are private. Fanatics secured the athlete relationship before he was even drafted into the NBA.²

In 2009, twelve NBA players sued Topps over signatures they had agreed to provide between February and September 2008, in quantities from 500 to 10,000 each, at fees running from $3 to $50 per signature. Derrick Rose contracted for 10,000 autographs at $25 each. Tracy McGrady's 1,000 at $50 each were the highest rate in the suit. Those rates are useless as modern benchmarks. But the insight is important: Topps buys a quantity of signatures at a unit price, knowing what they would sell the cards for later.⁷

Modern autographs are not scarce

Collectors meet one finished card at a time, while the manufacturer counts signatures as inventory.

Sticker autographs make this obvious. The player signs clear labels in bulk, sometimes thousands at a time. Those labels go back to the manufacturer to be put on cards later in production. Topps says stickers solve scheduling problems when on-card signing isn't practical. Upper Deck says labels let an athlete finish much of a season's autograph work in one sitting.⁸⁹

A signature looks unique once it's on a numbered card, but the ink may have come from a big pool of identical signed labels. The athlete signed the label before the final card existed and before anyone knew whether it would end up on a base autograph, a /99, a /10 or a one-of-one.

For this reason, on-card autographs are better. The athlete physically handled the card, the signature is part of the object rather than a label added later, and the production process is more cumbersome. Those are rational reasons to pay a premium for on-card ink.⁸

On-card ink still doesn't cap the athlete's signature. A 2026 Flagg one-of-one stays a one-of-one, but Flagg can still sign a different Topps card in 2027, another in 2028 and thousands more over his career. On-card creates a stronger connection to the cardboard. But it does not make the underlying autograph supply fixed.

The manufacturer creates the scarcity

Investors see the signature and serial number fused together on one slab, but they come from different supply systems.

The athlete controls whether he signs, while the manufacturer controls the print run. They decide how many base autos to make, how many parallels to create, which versions will be /99, /25, /10, /5, or 1/1. The scarcity of the card is designed and intentional, not by a natural shortage of the athlete's ability to write his name. Topps has been testing on-demand production with LeBron James's first 76ers card. The base is 7 bucks, but the chase is one autograph redemption for one lucky winner.

A one-of-one is worth orders of magnitude more than a common autograph from the same player, even though both signatures came from the same hand and may have been produced under the same broader athlete agreement and signed on the same day. Collectors pay for the particular card: its serial number, rookie status, patch, design, condition and place in the player's card history.

Victor Wembanyama's 2023-24 Panini Prizm Black one-of-one rookie, graded PSA 10, sold privately for $5.11 million in May 2026 with no autograph on it.¹⁰

Collectors pay for the serial number and the rookie year

Autographs do add value. A signature ties the card to the athlete, most directly when he signed the card itself. An autograph can also be the defining feature of an iconic release.

The trouble is that collectors often price a signature as if it were the scarce part. For a living, active player, that supply keeps growing: he can keep signing, manufacturers can keep commissioning new autograph products, sticker stock gets refilled and every season brings a new crop of numbered autos.

Sticker autos deserve the most skepticism. They pair the weakest physical link to the card with the clearest sign of bulk signing. A sticker on a /10 sits on a card with a print run of 10, but the autograph itself may be one of thousands signed in the same batch. Buyers of that card are paying for the /10.

On-card autos sit higher because the player signed the actual card. Even there, the lasting scarcity comes from the card: the one-of-one, the rookie year, the patch and the design can't be made again, while another autograph can. Grading works the same way. A PSA 10 carries a premium over a PSA 9 of the same card because it's harder to preserve a card in gem mint, let alone pull it in the first place.

This argument covers living, active players. Once a player dies, the supply of real signatures closes. A restrictive exclusive deal can also limit supply, as Michael Jordan's long exclusive with Upper Deck does.¹¹ Those are different economics from an active player who signs large quantities for modern products year after year.

What I'd pay for an active player's autograph

Collectors already know a /99 from a /10, a base rookie from a one-of-one and a PSA 9 from a PSA 10. I'd hold the autograph to the same test. For an active player, pay for what Topps can't make again: the serial number, the rookie year and a signature on the card itself.

Flagg is the live case, with his 2026-27 Topps cards set to add more of his ink. I'd skip sticker autos priced well above the same card unsigned and put that money into a low-numbered on-card Flagg parallel.