Which international athletes have the most PSA graded tickets?

Outside the United States, the most graded international tickets belong to Shohei Ohtani, and nobody is close. The board below ranks every person from outside the US by the number of PSA graded tickets that carry their full name in PSA's own population census, summing PSA's per-item totals across every form of every game. It is a count of graded copies, not of distinct tickets, and country is the nation the person is from, not the league they played in. Population is a point-in-time reading and this one is the 8 July 2026 census, read on 13 September 2026. The same rule applied to every nationality puts Ohtani **fifth overall**, behind only Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Kobe Bryant and Mickey Mantle.

The most graded international tickets are two Ohtani games

Ohtani's 3,066 is spread across 327 catalogue rows, the widest footprint on the board, but two games carry it. His first MLB home run, Angels 13, Indians 2 on 3 April 2018, has 750 graded copies once its full and stub rows are added together. The 50/50 game, Dodgers 20, Marlins 4 on 19 September 2024, has 621. Between them that is 1,371 tickets, 44.7% of his total, and each of those two games on its own out-counts the whole career of Pelé (637) or David Ortiz (586). His MLB debut, the ticket with the deepest price history in our Ohtani debut report, is a distant third among his own games at 165.

The gap to second place is 1,788 tickets. Messi's 1,278 would need to grow by 140% to reach Ohtani, and Messi's own biggest game, the 2003 Barcelona debut at 231, is less than a third of the size of either Ohtani game. The reason is the one the most-graded tickets report set out: population measures whether people knew to keep the ticket on the day. Ohtani's milestones happen in front of modern American crowds who buy the ticket to keep it, and the paper is clean enough to grade straight from the envelope.

Five of the ten are Latin American baseball players

Albert Pujols, Roberto Clemente, Mariano Rivera, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz are half the board: three from the Dominican Republic, one from Puerto Rico, one from Panama. Their five most graded games are all World Series games, and four of the five are the night the man was named Series MVP: Clemente in 1971, Rivera in 1999, Ramirez in 2004, Ortiz in 2013. Pujols is the exception only in that his three-home-run Game 3 in 2011 is not the clinching game. Ramirez's 2004 clincher alone is 600 graded copies, the third largest single game on the board, behind only Ohtani's two, because it ended an 86-year wait for Boston and the crowd knew it.

The pipeline runs deeper than the cut. Alexander Ovechkin is 11th on 516, and after him the next four are Pedro Martinez on 394, Kylian Mbappé on 385, Ichiro Suzuki on 379 and Connor Bedard on 357. Two of those four are baseball players, one of them Dominican, one Japanese. The sport that produces graded tickets for non-American names is, overwhelmingly, the one played in American stadiums.

Football sends three names, hockey one, and music none

Messi at 1,278, Cristiano Ronaldo at 880 and Pelé at 637 are the only non-baseball players apart from Gretzky. Messi has 1.45 times Ronaldo's count, and the shape is different: Ronaldo's biggest game is his Manchester United debut at 65 copies, while Messi's Barcelona debut alone is 231, the most graded international ticket that is not a baseball game. Pelé's top two are both from the 1958 World Cup, his debut against the Soviet Union (124) and the final against Sweden (105), and his farewell at the Cosmos in 1977 matches the final on 105. The World Cup tickets that reach auction, and what they made in one Goldin sale, are in World Cup ticket auction results. Ronaldo's own debut, the Sporting CP qualifier of 2002, is its own report.

Wayne Gretzky reaches 803 without a single big game. His largest, goal 802 passing Gordie Howe in March 1994, is 67 copies, the smallest top game on the board, and his count comes from 262 catalogue rows, second only to Ohtani's 327. Gretzky's career was graded one milestone at a time rather than one night at a time.

No musician, actor or public figure of any nationality comes near the cut. The highest is The Beatles on 161, then Elton John on 83, U2 on 81 and David Bowie on 80. Queen Elizabeth II has 65. The census is a sports census with a concert annex, and the annex is a little over a quarter the size of the tenth athlete.

The counting rule decides who is on the board

A ticket counts for a person only when PSA's catalogue label carries their name in full: Shohei Ohtani, Pelé, Cristiano Ronaldo, never a bare surname. A label that names two people counts for both, and a record-chase label such as "Gretzky passes Howe" counts for the man doing the passing. Every name on this board and on our all-nations board is counted by exactly that rule, so the figures are comparable: Ohtani's 3,066 here is the same 3,066 that places him fifth overall. It is also why this count of Messi reads 1,278 where our Messi population report reads 1,304: that report hand-cleaned his labels and merged forms by moment, this one applies one uniform rule to everybody. The difference is the rule, not the census.

The rule costs one real entry, and the inverse test says it costs no others. Every unclaimed name above 400 graded tickets is American: Deion Branch on 1,222, Hines Ward on 1,200, Terry Bradshaw on 981. Nobody from outside the United States is missing between the tenth place of 586 and the 11th of 516.

Ten names, 10,672 graded tickets between them, and 3,066 of those belong to one player who has been in the major leagues since 2018. Search any of them in the population database, open the exact graded copies in the ticket scans, or read how many PSA graded tickets exist for the census these figures come from.