What Is the Rarest Football Card Ever?

The 1894 Mayo Cut Plug anonymous/John Dunlop card is the rarest football card ever, by general consensus. In fact, the card is often referred to as “the Honus Wagner of football cards.”

That moniker, of course, draws a parallel to the Dunlop and the famous T206 Honus Wagner baseball card that has stood as the most valuable sports card in the world for most of the last 100 years owing to its scarcity and the legend surrounding it (i.e., the reasons the card was pulled from production after just a few were made and released).

As for the Dunlop card, it was part of the the first-ever concerted football card set (as opposed to the first single football card), featuring 35 players from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

Harvard’s Dunlop is pictured on this rare football card, though there is no mention of his name — hence the “anonymous” tag it sometimes receives.

How many of these cards exist? Estimates range from about six to as many as 20 known copies, which is super scarce no matter how you cut it.

The good news is that you can often find reprint versions of the cards on eBay for reasonable prices (affiliate link) if you just want to hold a modern version of this hobby antiquity in your hands.