During every collecting boom, something sells and people stop scrolling. Josh Allen and an Arizona grandmother who was waiting outside of a Mesa card shop before it opened last week owned that moment.
Robert Stowers got there an hour early. For her three grandchildren, she wanted a box of 2025 Topps Chrome Football cards. After some time, the 10–12–15-year-old boys opened the box and saw something that neither they nor their grandmother could fully understand at that time: a unique Josh Allen Gold NFL Shield Autograph redemption card. The kind of things that collectors look for years and years.
Fans Collect just sold that card for $1.35 million. To give you some idea, the average price of a condo in Phoenix is between $300,000 and $400,000. The family didn’t offer a card. In essence, they sold a piece of property, plus more. The money will likely be split between the three boys.
The fact that the card doesn’t exist yet makes this even stranger and more interesting. After 41 bids, the auction ended, and the winner paid seven figures for a redemption, which is basically a promise that Topps will make the card and send it to the winner. The buyer owns the rights to make something that is still being made. In different ways, that could be seen as either a strong act of faith or a very costly leap of faith.
The card has a direct link to Allen’s NFL MVP season in 2024. He was the first Bills player since Thurman Thomas to win the award that year. Allen wore a special gold shield patch on his jersey instead of the normal silver NFL logo as part of the NFL Honors Gold Shield program. That season, only five players wore one. There were only four Gold Shield cards made for each person: three without autographs and one signed, one-of-one card. That last card is the one that sold in Mesa.
Bear in mind that football cards had been quiet at the top of the market for a while. A rookie card of Tom Brady from June 2023 was the last NFL card to sell for more than a million dollars. That was almost three years ago. During that time, baseball, basketball, and even Pokémon were all selling seven figures. Even though football is the most-watched sport in the country, it had mostly avoided the party.
That had something to do with the change in licenses. Panini had the NFL contract for a long time. When Fanatics got a new deal that brought Topps back into the league for the first time since about 2016, things started over. Collectors didn’t know what to look for or where the new items would come from. The Allen card gives a pretty clear answer to that question.
Card Ladder’s football index has gone up 4.5% since 2025 Topps Chrome Football came out in mid-April. It had grown by the same amount during the same time period the two years before that. Even though it’s a small number, even small changes can quickly become big in a market where emotions change quickly and money follows momentum.
Though it’s hard to prove for sure yet, it seems like this sale has less to do with Josh Allen and more to do with how things are coming together around him. MVP season. Topps is coming back. True scarcity of one of a kind. A part of a game that was used at a certain time in NFL history. If you pull any of those threads, the card is worth a lot less.
Anyway, it’s still not clear if this is the start of a bigger football card surge or just one unusual event caused by unusual circumstances. There is a lot of uncertainty in high-end markets. It doesn’t really matter either way for three kids in Arizona who are splitting the money from a box their grandmother bought on a whim.
