Panini is the Italian company — founded in Modena in 1961 and famous for its football sticker albums — that built the European sticker hobby. Through the 1980s Panini issued multi-sport ‘Supersport’ sticker collections that gathered the biggest names across many sports into a single album: basketball alongside boxing, tennis, cycling and soccer. These were album stickers sold in Europe, not packaged cards sold in the United States, which is a large part of why American collectors find them unfamiliar and scarce today. This is the 1988 Supersport Michael Jordan, sticker #141 — a clean studio portrait of Jordan with a small USA flag roundel in the corner, identifying him within the set’s international line-up.

The most distinctive feature is on the reverse: because Panini paginated its album by printing two unrelated stickers back to back, the flip side of this Jordan is the Italian footballer Giuseppe Lorenzo (#16). The set was produced in two regional editions — a yellow-bordered Spanish version and this white-bordered Italian version — and the Spanish back simply carried a card number, while the Italian backs carried a second athlete such as Lorenzo or Tita. As a peel-and-stick sticker meant to be mounted in an album, very few survived unused with sharp corners and clean surfaces, which is why the gem-mint population is tiny: PSA has graded 113 across all grades, and only six have reached PSA 10. With 1990s inserts drawing most of the attention, well-preserved 1980s Jordan stickers like this remain genuinely scarce.