For years, Kenner’s Starting Lineups were the kind of collectible people bought with their eyes on the figure, not the small card packed beside it. Keeping the package sealed made sense when the action figure was the star attraction. In retrospect, that choice created a strange and increasingly important wrinkle for card collectors: the card may have been protected from being handled, but it was not necessarily protected from the long-term hazards of its own packaging.

That history is now showing up in auction results. A 1989 Diego Maradona Forza Campioni card graded PSA 10 sold for $2,100 on August 24, 2026. The result is especially notable beside a reported $799.99 sale for a 1989-90 Starting Lineup One on One Michael Jordan graded PSA 6. The Maradona result therefore moves past the Jordan card as the biggest reported sale among the leading cards tied to the Starting Lineup concept.

This is not simply a story about two famous athletes changing places in a price chart. It is also a reminder that the hobby’s most interesting cards do not always begin life as the main event. Maradona’s card comes from an Italian version of the toy-and-card formula, released under the name Forza Campioni, and its value is tightly tied to condition scarcity.

A toy-line extra becomes a top soccer-card result

Kenner introduced Starting Lineups in the United States in 1988. The familiar format paired an action figure with a trading card, but the figure was the collectible that commanded attention at the time. The card was an added piece rather than the reason many buyers kept an item in its original package.

A year later, Kenner adapted that approach for Italy with Forza Campioni, using Serie A players. It placed an American-style action-figure collectible in a league filled with globally recognizable football talent. The checklist included Paolo Maldini, Gianluca Vialli, Franco Baresi, Carlo Ancelotti and Dunga, alongside Ballon d’Or winners Marco van Basten, Roberto Baggio, Lothar Matthäus, Ruud Gullit and Maradona, pictured in a Napoli shirt.

That lineup makes Forza Campioni compelling on player appeal alone. Its deeper significance is historical. Soccer collecting had long been closely associated with stickers, rather than conventional trading cards. For some players in the Forza Campioni release, these cards represented their first licensed cards. The set consequently occupies an unusual intersection: it is an early licensed soccer-card issue, an action-figure companion, and a product attached to one of football’s most celebrated league eras.

In collecting, an item’s original purpose often helps explain why surviving examples look the way they do now. The card inside a sealed action-figure package was never intended to be carefully sleeved, top-loaded or submitted for grading decades later. The result is that a card’s path from toy-store bonus to high-grade collectible has been far less straightforward than its sealed-package history might suggest.

Why the PSA 10 matters so much

The $2,100 Maradona was graded PSA 10. PSA is a third-party grader, and its numerical grade is used by collectors as a shorthand for a card’s assessed condition. A 10 is its top commonly recognized numeric grade. Crucially, the label does not just identify Maradona or the Forza Campioni set; it identifies a specific copy that has met the threshold for that grade.

The available population figures make that distinction central to this sale. PSA has graded 116 cards from this set, 86 of which are Maradona cards. Only three PSA 10s are recorded, and all three are Maradonas. At the set level, three 10s from 116 graded cards works out to roughly 2.5%—an exceptionally small share of the grading population.

Population, in this context, means the number of copies recorded by a grading company at a particular grade. It is useful, but it should be read carefully. A population report is not a complete census of every copy made or every copy still in existence. It tells collectors what has been submitted to that grader and what grades those submitted cards received. That still gives the Maradona PSA 10 a clear point of scarcity within the graded market: just three examples sit at that top level in the reported figures.

The set’s packaging history may help explain why high grades are hard to find. Sealed Forza Campioni figures still exist, yet sealed does not automatically mean a pristine card is inside. Cards can be damaged or show significant color fading while remaining in their original packaging. That is the opposite of the simple assumption that unopened always means mint.

The lesson from Forza Campioni is that “sealed” describes whether a package was opened, while a card grade describes the condition of the card itself. They are related questions, but they are not the same question.

For a collector considering sealed product, that distinction has practical consequences. A sealed figure may carry its own appeal as a complete vintage toy item. But it should not be treated as proof that its enclosed card will earn a high grade if opened. Conversely, an already graded card offers a direct answer about the evaluated copy’s condition, although it separates the card from the original figure-and-package presentation.

From stickers to an early card oddity

The Maradona sale also lands in a sector of the hobby that has been steadily redefining what counts as an important early soccer card. Stickers were the dominant cultural format for soccer collectors for many years. Traditional cards existed, including Lionel Messi’s 2004 Mega Cracks and Cristiano Ronaldo’s 2003 Upper Deck cards, as well as 1993 and 1994 Upper Deck World Cup sets, but stickers remained the standard reference point for much of the soccer-collecting audience outside MLS.

That balance shifted more dramatically in the mid-2010s, when Panini’s 2014 World Cup Prizm gained traction. Modern collectors now have a more established card-focused framework for assessing soccer releases. That change gives older, less conventional licensed issues such as Forza Campioni a clearer place in the conversation, particularly when they feature players of Maradona’s stature.

Maradona’s Napoli association is important here because the Forza Campioni design does not present an abstract international-team or generic player identity. It places him in the club context that makes the release distinctive within his wider body of collectibles. The product also comes from Italy and is rooted in Serie A, rather than being a retroactively rebranded American release. Those details combine player, club, league and format into a specific collectible story.

That story can matter as much as sheer age. Two old cards are not automatically comparable just because they are both old, and two Maradona cards are not interchangeable merely because they share the same player. Collectors evaluating an early soccer card can ask more focused questions: Is it licensed? Where did it originate? Was it primarily sold as a card, a sticker, or part of another product? Which team and league context does it represent? How difficult is it to locate in the desired condition?

Those questions do not predict future values. They do, however, explain why a high-grade Forza Campioni Maradona can draw outsized attention. Its appeal is not based on a single rarity claim. It is built from the convergence of Maradona’s legacy, a Napoli image, an Italian Serie A setting, early licensed-card status for parts of the set, and a PSA 10 population limited to three reported examples.

What collectors should take from the result

The jump from the only earlier reported PSA 10 sale—$416 in May 2026—to $2,100 in August is dramatic. It is tempting to treat that change as a universal price guide for every Forza Campioni card, every Maradona collectible, or every sealed Kenner item. It is not. The sale concerns one grade, one player and an extremely limited top-grade population.

Instead, the stronger takeaway is methodological. A headline result can prompt collectors to look past the obvious front-facing collectible and research every component of a vintage package. In this case, the action figure was once the centerpiece, while the card became a major point of interest later. The same principle applies across physical collecting: provenance, format and condition can reshape the importance of an item long after its original retail purpose has faded. The broader appeal of collectible stories built around personal context is also evident in how story-driven collecting can put individual items in a new light.

A sensible research checklist for Forza Campioni buyers

  • Separate product goals: Decide whether the priority is a sealed figure, a loose card, or a graded card. Each represents a different collecting proposition.
  • Read the grade and population together: A PSA 10 population of three is relevant to the $2,100 Maradona sale; it does not describe all grades of the card.
  • Inspect for packaging-related issues: Original sealing does not rule out card damage or fading.
  • Keep the player context specific: Maradona in a Napoli kit, from an Italian Serie A-focused product, is a more precise description than simply “an old Maradona card.”
  • Do not confuse a single sale with a market floor: The two reported PSA 10 sales establish that prices can vary sharply even within the same calendar year.

The record-setting result gives Forza Campioni a well-earned spotlight, but it also reframes the original Starting Lineups premise. The toy was supposed to be the prize; decades later, the once-secondary card has become a serious collectible in its own right. For Maradona collectors, the $2,100 PSA 10 sale is a clear signal that overlooked packaging inserts can carry both historical weight and meaningful condition premiums.