Joe Montana Broke Tom Brady’s Record For The Most Expensive NFL Jersey Ever Sold And The Buyer Thinks It Should Have Cost More

Joe Montana wore a white No. 16 jersey while throwing five touchdowns in one of the most dominant Super Bowl performances ever, and somebody paid $1.515 million for it. That price broke the NFL jersey record previously held by Tom Brady, but the buyer still believes the San Francisco 49ers artifact was basically sitting in the clearance aisle.

The Montana jersey was acquired by high-end collectibles venture Treasure Trove after previously selling for $720,000 in 2023. In three years, the exact same piece of laundry more than doubled in value, which is either a tremendous investment return or proof that nobody should ever throw away anything a Hall of Fame quarterback sweated in.

Joe Montana’s Jersey Doubled In Value And Still Looks ‘Cheap’

This is not some random regular-season uniform somebody dug out of a storage locker.

Montana wore the jersey in Super Bowl XXIV on Jan. 28, 1990, when San Francisco demolished the Denver Broncos 55-10. He completed 22 of 29 passes for 297 yards and five touchdowns, won his third Super Bowl MVP and finished his career 4-0 on football’s biggest stage.

If you are going to spend seven figures on a shirt, that is about as much historical baggage as you can cram into the stitching.

Treasure Trove paid $1.515 million, surpassing the $1.391 million paid in 2023 for the jersey Brady wore during the final game of his NFL career. The company’s CEO, AJ Scaramucci, somehow looked at that record-setting number and came away believing he had found value.

He called elite game-worn memorabilia “freakishly underpriced” compared with trading cards.

That sounds insane until you look at what cardboard has been doing.

A one-of-one Shohei Ohtani card sold for $11 million in July. A Michael Jordan-Kobe Bryant dual Logoman card went for $12.932 million last year. Meanwhile, the jersey Montana actually wore while throwing five touchdowns in a Super Bowl costs roughly one-eighth of that.

You can see the argument.

The card is rare. The jersey was physically on Joe Montana while he was dismantling John Elway’s Broncos on national television.

Game-Worn Memorabilia Has A Different Kind Of Scarcity

Montana’s Super Bowl wardrobe is unusually limited.

He played in four Super Bowls but wore only three jerseys because he reused the same red jersey from Super Bowl XIX in Super Bowl XXIII. That reused jersey sold for $1.212 million in 2023, setting the NFL jersey record at the time.

Brady then passed him with his final-game jersey.

Montana has now taken the record back.

The whole thing feels like the most expensive version of two retired quarterbacks continuing an argument nobody asked them to have.

There is also a broader collectibles question hiding underneath the price tag. Cards are designed to be collectibles.

Companies manufacture scarcity with one-of-ones, parallels, patches and autographs, then collectors chase them from the moment a product releases.

Game-worn memorabilia is different.

There was only one jersey on Montana’s body during that Super Bowl because there was only one game. Nobody at the time was designing it as an investment vehicle. It became valuable because history happened while he was wearing it.

That may be what Treasure Trove is betting on.

$1.515 million sounds ridiculous for a football jersey.

Then you remember an Ohtani card sold for $11 million.

Suddenly Montana’s sweaty old work shirt starts looking like a bargain.