Editorial

The strongest junk wax football set: 1989 Score

Published July 17, 2026

The junk wax era produced a lot of football cardboard. Pro Set alone shipped billions of cards between 1989 and 1993. Topps, Fleer, Score, Action Packed, GameDay, Stadium Club, and Playoff Contenders each fought for shelf space during a decade in which football was still a distant second to baseball in the hobby's attention. Most of what was printed is worth pennies. But one football set from the era holds its stature the way no other does, and the argument for its supremacy is unusually clean. This piece is the case.

The claim

1989 Score Football is the strongest junk wax football set. It is the strongest not because Score printed the fewest cards, and not because the design is the best (though a case can be made for both), but because of the rookies. In one 330-card base checklist, the 1989 Score set produced five Hall of Fame rookie cards: Barry Sanders, Troy Aikman, Deion Sanders, Derrick Thomas, and Michael Irvin. That has never been matched by any single football set of the modern era.

The rookies

Five Hall of Famers, all with their first widely-collected licensed card in the 1989 Score base set:

Barry Sanders #257, Detroit Lions. Ten NFL seasons, ten Pro Bowls, four rushing titles, 1997 MVP, Hall of Fame class of 2004. Retired at 30 while still the most electric running back alive.
Troy Aikman #270, Dallas Cowboys. Twelve NFL seasons, six Pro Bowls, three Super Bowl titles (XXVII, XXVIII, XXX), Hall of Fame class of 2006. The number-one overall pick who inherited a 1-15 team and left it a dynasty.
Deion Sanders #246, Atlanta Falcons. Fourteen NFL seasons, eight Pro Bowls, two Super Bowl titles, Hall of Fame class of 2011. The only athlete in history to play in both a Super Bowl and a World Series.
Derrick Thomas #258, Kansas City Chiefs. Eleven NFL seasons, nine Pro Bowls, 126.5 career sacks (still a Chiefs franchise record more than two decades after his death), Hall of Fame class of 2009. The seven-sack game against Seattle in 1990 is still the single-game record.
Michael Irvin #22, Dallas Cowboys. Twelve NFL seasons, five Pro Bowls, three Super Bowl titles, Hall of Fame class of 2007. The Playmaker.

Two of the five (Aikman and Irvin) went on to win three Super Bowls together in Dallas. Two more (Barry Sanders and Deion Sanders) are on any short list of the most-watched football players of the 1990s. The fifth (Derrick Thomas) had a career that would have been remembered even longer had it not ended in a car accident at 33. Five Hall of Famers, all from a single base set, printed in the same year the Berlin Wall fell.

The comparison across the era

To justify the "strongest of the era" claim, the set has to be measured against every other football set of the 1984 to 1993 window. The comparison is not close.

1989 Pro Set: Pro Set launched the same year as 1989 Score with a larger checklist (561 cards) and included the same rookie class, but its production volumes were roughly an order of magnitude higher, its design was flatter, and it is universally regarded as the mass-produced version of the same class. Two of the same HOFers (Barry Sanders, Aikman, Deion, Derrick Thomas, Michael Irvin) have Pro Set rookies, but the Score is the collectible flagship.
1989 Topps: Topps still had the football license and printed a base set, but the design was tired, the rookie subset was thin, and the hobby moved past Topps football in favor of Score and Pro Set within a single year.
1989 Topps Traded: An update set that included Aikman #70T and a few of the same names, but the boxed-set distribution and the "Traded" label push it out of true-rookie consideration for most collectors.
1990 Score: The Emmitt Smith #101 rookie is one of the era's great RCs, and the set also includes Junior Seau and Cortez Kennedy Hall of Fame rookies. Three HOFers from a base set is impressive, but it is two fewer than 1989. Emmitt is the single-card centerpiece of 1990 Score; the 1989 class is a whole roster.
1990 Pro Set: Emmitt Smith #800B rookie. Same Emmitt centerpiece, without the depth Score had a year earlier.
1991 Score: Brett Favre #611 rookie. One HOFer. A great rookie card but a shallow set behind it.
1991 Pro Set: No comparable HOF rookie anchor.
1991 Stadium Club: Brett Favre RC in a premium set. Beautiful cards, one HOF rookie.
1992 Bowman: The rebooted Bowman brand debuted the same year Bowman Baseball did on the basketball side. Its football checklist did not produce comparable HOF depth.
1993 Topps Finest: Refractors and premium foilboard, one of the highest-status modern sets. A different economic object than junk wax. Not comparable.

No other single football set from the era produced five Hall of Fame rookies. The closest is 1990 Score with three (Emmitt, Seau, Cortez Kennedy). Every other set produced one or two anchor RCs at best. 1989 Score sits on a peak of its own.

The design

The 1989 Score football design is a color-blocked border on the front, wrapping a full-bleed action photograph, with the team-color palette applied to the top and bottom bars. The Score wordmark sits vertically on the left edge. The back is a lighter cardstock with a personal write-up, career statistics, and a small headshot in a photo inset. It is one of the era's most-recognized designs, and every collector who came up in 1989 can identify a Score card from three feet away.

Two design choices aged well. First, the photography is genuinely good. Score used studio-quality action shots that avoided the flat sideline images that dominated Topps and Pro Set of the same year. Second, the color-blocked border, while it makes centering a difficult grade (the wide colored margins expose any print shift), gives the front a confident, magazine-like look that reads clean even at thumbnail size.

The print run problem

1989 Score football was not scarce. Like every mass-produced set of the era, Score printed vastly more cards than the market could ever absorb. Raw copies of the base rookies trade in single digits (Sanders, Aikman, Deion all sit in the $5 to $20 range as raw commons), and even the flagship Barry Sanders #257 is not a difficult raw card to find in near-mint condition.

The condition variable is centering. The wide colored borders of the design amplify any print shift, and PSA 10 population reports show the set has meaningful grade scarcity at the top of the population curve. A PSA 10 Barry Sanders #257 has traded in the four figures despite the base card being cheap raw. A PSA 10 Aikman #270 sits in the low hundreds. Grade unlocks the value the print run buries.

The retrospective and modern tribute

The clearest retrospective signal that the 1989 Score design is the strongest football set of the era is how often modern tribute product reprints it. Panini Chronicles has released a "1989 Score design" reproduction in football almost every year of its existence. Leaf Memories, Prestige, and other retro-styled products cycle back to the 1989 Score border as a recognizable, hobby-legible visual identity. The design is doing duty as the shorthand for late-junk-wax football, the way 1989 Upper Deck baseball is shorthand for late-junk-wax baseball.

Modern reprint frequency is not proof of a set's original quality, but it is a lagging indicator of what collectors treat as canonical. No other football set of the era gets the same tribute treatment as 1989 Score.

Where the set sits inside the museum

Three of the five Hall of Fame rookies from 1989 Score football are cataloged in the Junk Wax 50:

Derrick Thomas #258 and Michael Irvin #22 remain honorable-mention candidates and the most likely future JW50 inclusions from the set. The concentration of a single set across multiple JW50 slots is not accidental. It reflects a genuine editorial position: 1989 Score football is the deepest single-set rookie class of the entire era, and any curated ranking of iconic junk-wax cardboard has to weight it accordingly.

Conclusion

There are prettier junk wax football sets (1991 Stadium Club is arguably the era's most beautiful). There are rarer ones (Score's own 1989 Supplemental Series is a fraction of the base print run). There are more historically important ones for narrower reasons (1993 Topps Finest introduced refractors). But no other single junk wax football set produced five Hall of Fame rookies, and no other single junk wax football set is as instantly identifiable, as often reprinted, or as densely populated with players who defined the entire decade that followed.

1989 Score football is the strongest junk wax football set. The case is not close.