“I f—ing love being the underdog.”
In a Fanatics-branded private helicopter flying over New Jersey en route to Manhattan’s West 30th Street helipad, billionaire Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin expresses his thoughts on his company, which has an increasingly ubiquitous presence in the world of sports.
“I like to think of myself as a startup,” says Rubin. “All we want to do is make things better for the fan, better for the collector.”
On Saturday, Sept. 14, Fanatics demonstrated that interest by organizing its third “Topps Hobby Rip Night” with events across 568 hobby shops around the world, including 10 shops outside the U.S. (Toronto, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, Paris, Milan, Thessaloniki in Greece, and Roermond and Amsterdam in the Netherlands). The events featured games and giveaways, including over 100,000 free packs of event-specific cards.
But perhaps most crucially, they also included personal appearances by 100 athletes and entertainers like Tom Brady at Triple Sports Cards in Dallas, Victor Wembanyama at Boomtown Cards & Collectibles in San Antonio, Kevin Hart at Collector’s World in Annandale, Virginia, JuJu Watkins at Burbank Sportscards in Burbank, California and Mike Trout at Average Joe’s Sports Cards in Buena Park, California — big names with pop-culture relevance that draws social-media attention and entices people out to hobby shops in big numbers, particularly kids. According to Topps, an estimated 50,000 people turned up across all locations.
It’s an event that symbolizes Fanatics’ rapidly growing influence on the hobby — a consolidation of power in a long-stagnant industry and an ambition to exponentially increase the number of collectors in part through player, league and celebrity involvement in the trading card business at an unprecedented level. Last year, they even tried to get Taylor Swift involved.
Since Fanatics started building out its collectibles business in 2021 with decades-long agreements with major sports leagues and players associations, and the acquisition of Topps shortly after, Rubin and the company have set out to be a singular force in the sports card industry. And with athletes, entertainers, shop owners and kids around the world buying into that vision — even though a segment of collectors remain wary of Fanatics’ large influence — it appears they are making big strides toward that objective. But in many ways, Rubin and Fanatics are just beginning their hobby dominance as they reposition collectors from an often overlooked niche to the pinnacle of sports fandom.
Saturday, Sept. 14 at 1 p.m. ET: Rubin embarks on his own tour of five hobby shops in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey over a span of eight hours.
The journey starts in South Jersey, at Card Capital, a shop just east of Philadelphia. Huddling up in a spacious back stockroom, Rubin, his entourage, and special guest PJ Tucker of the L.A. Clippers, the NBA’s preeminent sneakerhead, prepare a game plan for the event.
Rubin explains the Rip Night concept — it’s all about getting Topps packs into sports fans’ hands, but with an air of familiarity and friendship.
“PJ, cards are like sneakers, and you know sneakers better than anyone,” he says. “But sneakers, watches, and art are all down. Cards are up.”
He’s not wrong. Markets for luxury watches, high-end art, and sneakers have all fallen off in 2024 after reaching post-pandemic heights. Cards, despite falling from all-time market highs reached during the pandemic-era resurgence, remain relatively strong: The market indexes maintained by CardLadder, which tracks trading card sales across the top online marketplaces, show that modern cards (1984-2008) and ultra-modern cards (2009-present) — the segments most relevant to Fanatics’ interests — are up 5.12 percent and 0.24 percent year to date, respectively.
At Card Capital and Wheelhouse in Philadelphia’s western suburbs, where Rubin is joined by Eagles defensive end Brandon Graham, they are surrounded by kids. They sign autographs, pose for photos, and trade cards with young collectors — handing out higher-value cards for the kids’ lower-value trade bait — until every request is satisfied. Rubin also makes a stump speech repeated throughout the day: “Collectors are the greatest sports fans in the world.”
For sports fans in Rubin’s orbit, his declaration creates an inner calculus: If Rubin and the athletes on his trading cards are friends, then the social hierarchy of sports fans becomes clear. It’s not just about who has season tickets or who watches every game. Collecting is now the way to get closest to one’s sporting heroes. Where else can you sit across from Jimmy Rollins, Bronny James or Kevin Hart and swap something of yours for something ostensibly of theirs than the intimate confines of a Topps partnered hobby shop?
Kevin Hart does the unexpected while making trades at his local hobby shop…
This kid just experienced a core memory. pic.twitter.com/8VQ4On9dPo
— Topps (@Topps) September 14, 2024
London, England, 5:30 p.m. BST: Less than a mile away from Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, sits Kaboom Sports Trading Cards — the only store in the city where you can buy and rip packs. Almost 100 collectors leave little room to welcome the night’s host, and Arsenal legend, Ray Parlour to kick off the soccer rips. It doesn’t take long until shouts of “one of one” ring through the shop floor as attendees of all ages pull their two parallels from ‘Show Up For Show Time’, a UK card show exclusive product released by Topps earlier this year.
Once the giveaways are ripped and sleeved, Parlour holds a Q&A upstairs where he shares stories about his playing days with Thierry Henry and what he thinks about the hobby now compared to back then.
“It’s amazing isn’t it,” Parlour says. “I know it’s big in America. I used to collect sticker books back in the ‘80s and it was big in those days, but it’s got bigger here now. Kids, youngsters, and adults can sell cards now. It’s a good business to be in. I’m really happy to see everyone out, enjoying the sunshine, and now having a lovely night.”
Those who won tickets to the event take photos and autographs with Parlour, before the party really starts again downstairs with a trade night and those who fancy their chances.
“Nothing big, just a £20K rip,” comments one partygoer, as someone purchases 80 boxes of Topps UEFA Club Competitions Inception with the hope of pulling Barcelona rookie sensation Lamine Yamal.
It isn’t just soccer being ripped though we also see autographs from Iron Man out of Marvel Topps Chrome and Victor Wembanyama out of Topps Chrome Basketball pulled on the floor. It’s a sign of Topps’ growing international foothold ahead of taking over the Premier League license from Panini next year. —Andrew Mackie
Back Stateside, 4:30 p.m. ET: Rapper Quavo texts Rubin, asking when he should be at Santiago Sports Cards, a New Jersey hobby shop they were scheduled to appear at together. Rubin replies, then shares his Instagram — he’s been exchanging direct messages with Paris Saint-Germain player Achraf Hakimi all day.
Starting at the top of the thread, he scrolls through the conversation that includes him thanking the PSG defender for staying beyond his scheduled time at the Rip Night event in Paris and for giving away a Lionel Messi autograph to a young fan who cried upon receiving it. Hakimi messages back how impressed he was by the passion he witnessed from collectors.
Hakimi just pulled a Lionel Messi autograph card and gave it to a young fan…
The reaction is EVERYTHING 🥹❤️ pic.twitter.com/sYoHMK0ENd
— Topps (@Topps) September 14, 2024
Rubin says Fanatics has over 3,000 partnerships with athletes, artists, and entertainers — the majority being athletes. In press releases, Fanatics touts how it “partners with more than 900 of the largest sporting organizations in the world” across its core businesses. Through those partnerships, and proven out through their growth in size and influence, Fanatics has demonstrated a powerful connectivity between fans, merchandise, and collectibles.
When the Fanatics helicopter lands at the West 30th Street helipad in New York City, Quavo is already there, ready to travel ahead to Santiago Sports Cards in Matawan, NJ as Rubin heads to Bodega Cards in Jersey City. Meanwhile, MLB deputy commissioner Noah Garden has been calling Rubin — he’s stuck in line at one of the participating Rip Night shops and can’t get in.
“I’ll get someone to fix that right now,” Rubin tells Garden, quickly hanging up so he can delegate. Garden is at Bodega Cards and this appearance is scheduled to be the shortest.
Upon arriving, it immediately becomes apparent that this stop won’t be as short as planned. Rubin is whisked inside the store so the shop’s manager can proudly show him the “hit wall” — a board full of Polaroid photos of collectors and their in-store pulled high-value cards, or “hits.” It sits above what they call “The Rubin Shrine” — two glossy photos of Rubin at previous events. After taking a group photo to add to the shrine, Rubin heads outside to the Topps truck, which is holding down Bodega Cards’ block party for Rip Night.
No athlete is at this event with him, but as a solo act, Rubin knows how to pull out all the tricks: After trading away a $1,000 Tom Brady card to a young collector for their low-value card, Rubin fires up his rolodex.
Within minutes, Tom Brady and Robert Kraft are FaceTiming with him, waving and saying hi to a surprisingly gushing crowd of New Jersey sports fans.
“I just think when you run a consumer company, it’s important to get out there and kind of communicate the things you’re doing,” Rubin says when later asked why he’s putting himself forward as the new face of the collecting business.
Pulling around back of Santiago Sports Cards after driving down in a caravan, Rubin finds that Quavo is waiting for him.
“What are we doing, Mike?” he asks, getting out of his car.
In the shop’s stockroom, Quavo and Rubin do a short “pre-game rip” of the new unlicensed Topps Chrome Basketball set — the company’s answer to Panini’s licensed NBA cards, but with one advantage: Spurs star and reigning Rookie of the Year Victor Wembanyama has autographed rookie cards in the Topps set — arguably the most desirable new sports cards on the planet right now — while Panini’s NBA cards of Wembanyama lack his signature due to the player’s exclusive deal with Fanatics. Topps will regain the NBA license in 2026 and the NFL license next year.
Quavo, however, is slightly confused. He pulls a Wembanyama card, but notices a lack of excitement around him. “You need to pull a special Wemby,” he’s told, or one that’s a numbered parallel.
“But where are the jerseys?” he asks, noticing that the cards all feature images of the players with the official NBA logos, team names, and trademarks photoshopped out. Rubin explains that this will be changing — educating Quavo on the ins and outs of the hobby as a friend would, creating a seat at the table for Quavo’s fame, image, and brand on behalf of Fanatics.
After meeting the crowd for 20 minutes, Rubin and Quavo head out. Their appearance was highlighted by a surprise, though: A young collector in the crowd had a Fanatics Fest exclusive Travis Scott “Cactus Jack” Topps Chrome baseball box, sealed and unopened. In exchange for letting Quavo open the box — “Shoutout to my homie Travis Scott!” he roared as he ripped open the box, one of just 1,000 made, which are currently selling for upwards of $2,800 a box on eBay — Rubin promised the collector another Cactus Jack box.
“It was hot as f— in there,” Quavo exclaims coming out of the back door of the shop. Arms full with boxes of cards gifted to him by Rubin. “We’re gonna rip all this on the heli,” he declares.
During the helicopter ride back into Manhattan, Rubin lays out the changes Fanatics has made to Topps’ business, noting how they’ve hired more customer service representatives, cut down the redemption queue and innovated with things like the debut patch in MLB and MLS, more on-card autographs, and damaged card remakes. He says they’re spending more on printing than ever before.
With Topps’ licenses for Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and The Simpsons, plus the NFL, NBA, Premier League and the WWE on the horizon, Rubin projects their collectibles business to double within the next 17 months.
“Like, I still feel like we gotta run that like a startup,” he says, noting how much room there is to grow — Fanatics Collect, and the new live card breaking platform, Fanatics Live, are still young. When asked about future acquisitions, Rubin brushes off talk of potential broadcast rights deals — for now, after years of rapid deals and expanding circles, he’s content to build with the sand he’s got.
“That means you can just focus: how do you do what you do better every day?” Rubin says.
But to create what he sees as better, there needs to be change. In fact, he has a message to the hobby: It’s relied far too much on luck. It’s been lazy. It’s lacked innovation and investment.
“You know, we don’t want to count on luck. We want to count on innovation and product,” he says, pointing to how trading cards became talk of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics when Topps introduced a 1-of-1 card of Team USA men’s basketball stars LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and Kevin Durant autographed by all three that was randomly sent to someone who purchased the print-on-demand Topps Now card of the trio. The chase prompted a record Topps Now print run of 588,030 and competing bounties for the autographed card reaching as high as $500,000. The card has yet to surface, so the chase continues to create buzz.
It’s an example of reactive merchandising, or as Rubin puts it: “We’re able to take great moments that happen in sports and life, and turn them into merchandise and collectibles. It’s a way that we can better connect fans and athletes together.”
Rubin says Fanatics won’t force those connections, though. He describes how Topps tried to get Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce to do a card together last NFL season, but Swift’s camp didn’t respond, so Fanatics left it at that.
But when asked about increasing print runs of sports card sets since Fanatics took over Topps, and the potential for market saturation or a decline in value for sports card collectors, Rubin points to the strengths of Nike’s growth over the past decade. He acknowledges his business is dependent on a scarcity model to drive sales — one that could appear at odds with Rubin’s vocally populist collecting push.
“The key is, if you don’t put enough product out there, you drive prices too high. If we kept print runs lower than they are right now, prices go up that much more. We care about getting the right balance out there.”
Another big concern for collectors is the consolidation of the industry and any one or two companies accumulating too much unilateral control over it.
“We still think we have a relatively small market,” Rubin says, pointing how small Fanatics’ slice is within the wider betting and merchandise industries. He explains: “Our market share is still relatively small relative to what we could do. So our job is to say, ‘How do we make it better for the collector? How do we make it better for the sports fan?’ Not ‘How do we leverage our size?’”
Those concerns could be difficult to shake, though. In a recent survey of collectors conducted by The Athletic, 47.5 percent of respondents expressed a “generally negative” feeling for Fanatics’ influence on the sports collectibles industry, many citing dissatisfaction relating to their merchandise business and general fears around any single company gaining significant control over the collectibles space. In the same survey, only 10.2 percent responded “generally positive.” But 42.3 percent were either neutral or undecided.
Events like Hobby Rip Night seem to be swaying a sizable portion of those in the latter camps toward the positive. Hobby shop owners are increasingly buying in, too. The first Rip Night, held in September 2023, had 206 participating shops. The second, held in February of this year, had 409. Saturday had 568. According to Topps, 20 percent of shops that took part in February achieved a single-day sales record that day.
West Village, New York City, 7:00 p.m. ET: At the last stop of the night, Bleecker Trading, Yankees players Nestor Cortes and Anthony Volpe are waiting for Rubin so they can start the show.
Volpe apparently has a hard out, but softens once the festivities commence. “We can’t make this guy late for his date,” Rubin quips to Volpe for a laugh.
They all end up staying past 8:30 p.m. — a full hour after the day was scheduled to wrap.
Repeating his stump speech to rapturous applause, Rubin once again declares to a packed-out hobby shop: “Collectors are the greatest sports fans in the world.”
(Top photo: Fanatics)
