Panini, the Italian company from Modena that defined the sticker-album hobby, brought NBA basketball to European collectors at the end of the 1980s. This is sticker #76 from the 1988–89 Panini Basket NBA 89 set — the Spanish-market edition, distributed by Panini España and manufactured in Italy by Edizioni Panini of Modena, dated © 1989. These were peel-and-stick ‘cromos’ sold loose from Spanish kioscos and bookshops and meant to be mounted into the NBA 89 album; the back even instructs collectors to buy the album and request missing stickers from Panini España in Torroella de Montgrí (Gerona). The set ran #1–292 in a single series and contained three Jordan stickers — #76, #261 and #285. While #261 and #285 use action photography, #76 is the portrait — and it is the most valuable of the three.

The image is a clean, classic head-and-shoulders shot of Jordan smiling in the white Bulls home jersey against a soft blue background, with ‘76 – Michael Jordan (Bulls)’ and the set’s red-and-blue stripe beneath. There is a special note on this particular card: one of the Type 1 original photographs in the DimeLabs collection is the photo-match source for this sticker — the exact image Panini licensed to produce #76 — so DimeLabs holds both the original photograph and the finished card it became. Here is what makes the sticker so hard in gem: these were built to be peeled and stuck down, so the overwhelming majority were destroyed in the act of collecting them — pasted into albums, handled by kids, never meant to be preserved. The European-only distribution kept them well outside the American market and the hobby’s radar for decades, so relatively few were ever submitted at all. PSA has graded just 126 across all grades, with only 15 reaching PSA 10 — a genuinely thin gem population for a card most American collectors have never heard of.