A $1 million sports card sale doesn’t feel as momentous as it might have been a decade ago, five years ago or even one year ago. There’s been one or more publicly known sports card sales of $1 million or more in each of the last nine months, and in 12 of the past 13 months.In less than a one-month span from May to June, five new members joined the $1 million card club: Nikola Jokić, Cristiano Ronaldo, Josh Allen, Victor Wembanyama and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Of those five, Wembanyama made by far the biggest splash into the deep end when his 2023 Panini Prizm one-of-one black parallel rookie card with a PSA 10 grade sold for $5.1 million in a private sale. And since then, the iconic Jackie Robinson and young gun Macklin Celebrini joined the club, the former taking longer than many baseball fans would’ve expected and the latter becoming the first hockey player not named Wayne Gretzky to join the club.With those seven additions, there are now 33 players across five sports who’ve had one or more of their cards sell for at least $1 million, according to sales database Card Ladder. (These are all publicly known sales and there are likely more unpublicized private $1 million card deals.)The very first $1 million sports card sale came in April 2015, when a famed 1909 Honus Wagner T206 Sweet Caporal card with a PSA 3 (on a 1-10 scale) grade sold for $1.32 million. Another $1 million card sale didn’t occur again until October 2016, when a PSA 5 example of the Wagner card fetched $3.12 million.Fast forward a decade later and there were two cards that sold for more than $2.5 million on June 28 of this year. A LeBron James 2003-04 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection rookie patch autographed card numbered 9 of 23 produced went for $2.93 million. A 2018 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani #150 Superfractor, the one-of-a-kind parallel of one of his top rookie cards, sold for $2.56 million.We’ve gone from a single $1 million card sale occurring in a year to 10 sales of $1 million cards happening already in July and August. And that number could very well rise between when this was published and when you read it.The buyer of the $5.11 million Wembanyama card in June, who spoke to The Athletic on the condition of anonymity due to personal security concerns stemming from the high value of the card, laid out some interesting reasoning as to why he’s heavy into the ultra high-end sports card market.“The cost to buy a franchise of any kind really, like MLS to NFL, it’s so cost prohibitive,” he said.“So what this (high-end sports card market) has become, in my opinion, is the next best thing to that. And it might be better. Owning a professional sports team comes with an enormous amount of s—. You have to tie up an incredible amount of capital after the asset purchase for payroll and everything else. There’s social responsibility. Obviously, you’re playing in the biggest league and it’s a great asset to own and all that stuff. But if you don’t own the majority of the team — I was looking into team ownership for a lower stake in a basketball team. I was told, ‘Look man, if you’re not gonna be the governor, the main guy, the main owner, just buy season tickets on the wood because they’ll treat you better.’“You have no voting rights. Even socially, if you wanted to … brag about that you own 10 percent of, say, the Lakers. People will be like, ‘You don’t own the Lakers.’ I tied up millions of dollars of cash for this and that’s it?“So what is card ownership, then? If you’re going after these grail cards, like the true, true, ‘f— you’ cards. Like I have the Shohei (Ohtani)/Aaron Judge dual Logoman auto that sold. I paid $2.16 million for that. … I have people I answer to financially when I make investments or decisions. They’re like, ‘You could buy a f—ing house.’ … I say the difference is the one or two percent of billionaires in the world don’t really, really, really want my house. But they f—ing want that card, though. Somebody who made stupid, stupid, stupid money that just for whatever reason loves Wembanyama, they’re not gonna pay 3x for a piece of real estate.”