How Fanatics' Acquisition of Topps Changed the Sports Card Hobby

On January 4, 2022, Fanatics paid roughly $500 million for the trading card business of The Topps Company. That sentence, on its own, understates what happened. The deal didn't just move a legacy brand from one owner to another, it was the capstone of a five-month stretch in which Topps lost its 70-year baseball monopoly, watched a $1.3 billion IPO collapse, and ended up inside a collectibles empire being built by the most ambitious operator the hobby had ever seen.

Four years later, the consequences are everywhere. Fanatics now holds exclusive trading card rights to MLB, the NBA, and, starting April 2026, the NFL. It owns Topps, PWCC, the Fanatics Collect marketplace, Fanatics Live streaming commerce, and Fanatics Fest, the hobby's largest live event. Topps' own trading card revenue grew from $368 million in 2020 to approximately $1.6 billion in 2024, a fourfold increase that tells you exactly how much oxygen Fanatics pumped into the brand. Panini, the company Topps used to share the hobby stage with, is now in court alleging Fanatics built a monopoly, while running out the clock on its remaining licensed products.

This is the real story of what the acquisition changed. Not the headlines, not the corporate talking points, the actual mechanics, the actual numbers, and what any of it means for the collector trying to decide whether a box of 2026 Topps Chrome is a smart purchase.

How Topps Lost Baseball in a Single August Morning

You can't understand the Fanatics acquisition without understanding why Topps was buyable in the first place. For seventy years, Topps and Major League Baseball were so entwined that most collectors couldn't picture one without the other. Topps produced its first MLB cards in 1951, held the league's exclusive trading card license from 2009, and in 2018 extended that deal through 2025. Topps paid the MLB Players Association $20.4 million in 2020 licensing fees alone, the largest of any licensee in any category.

On August 19, 2021, that relationship ended. The MLBPA and MLB informed Topps neither agreement would be renewed, and that a newly created Fanatics venture would become the exclusive trading card licensee instead. ESPN's reporting at the time cited an MLBPA internal memo describing the Fanatics deal as "more than 10 times larger than any [agreement] the union has ever agreed to," with combined league and union commitments projected to generate roughly $2 billion by 2045. MLB, the MLBPA, the NBA, the NBPA, and the NFLPA all received equity in the new Fanatics venture, aligning every major league with Fanatics' long-term success rather than Topps' or Panini's.

The timing could not have been worse for Topps. Four months earlier, in April 2021, Topps had announced a $1.3 billion merger with Mudrick Capital Acquisition Corporation II, a SPAC deal that would have taken Topps public on NASDAQ under the ticker TOPP, priced at 12.5x projected 2021 adjusted EBITDA to capitalize on the pandemic-era card boom. One day after MLB pulled the license, on August 20, 2021, Topps and Mudrick mutually terminated the merger. The market understood immediately: the business being taken public had just lost its crown jewel, and no public-market investor was going to absorb that risk.

From that August morning forward, Topps was a company looking for a buyer. Fanatics already knew it. Michael Rubin already had the capital.

What Fanatics Actually Bought

The Fanatics-Topps deal closed on January 4, 2022, reported by Reuters and CNBC at roughly $500 million. Fanatics' press release did not disclose the price, but the number has held up across subsequent reporting.

What $500 million bought, specifically, was Topps' sports and entertainment division, all physical and digital trading cards, operations in 10 countries, distribution into 100-plus countries, and approximately 350 employees who transitioned to Fanatics Collectibles. It did not include Topps' candy and gift card businesses, which were spun off into a new entity called Bazooka Companies and retained by Michael Eisner's Tornante Company and its partners at Madison Dearborn.

Eisner's Tornante had taken Topps private in 2007 at roughly $400 million. Over the 15 years that followed, Tornante and Madison Dearborn grew it into a trading card business doing approximately $560 million in annual revenue with $160 million in EBITDA. Without the MLB license, that business had a very different forward trajectory, which is why the $500 million price tag, coming months after the sport's most valuable license had been stripped, looked like the right number to both sides.

Rubin's public framing in the acquisition press release captured Fanatics' strategic view plainly: "With trading cards and collectibles being a significant pillar of our long-term plans to become the leading digital sports platform, we are excited to add a leading trading cards company to build out our business." Eisner's own statement read more like the emotional handoff it actually was, calling Topps "a jewel in the Fanatics portfolio" and Rubin "the perfect entrepreneur to lead this company forward."

Mike Mahan, a former Dick Clark Productions CEO with a background in investment banking and private equity, was named CEO of Fanatics Collectibles and has held that role since. David Leiner, Topps' existing Global VP/GM of trading cards, stayed on as president of trading cards under Mahan, an early signal that Fanatics planned to build on Topps' institutional knowledge rather than replace it.

Why the Hobby Reacted the Way It Did

For collectors, the Fanatics-Topps deal landed harder than a normal ownership change because Topps wasn't just a manufacturer, it was hobby identity. Baseball flagship, Chrome, Bowman, Topps NOW, Heritage, vintage reprints, and decades of collector memory all lived under that name.

People weren't reacting to product lines changing hands. They were reacting to the fact that one of the hobby's most recognizable legacy brands was becoming a piece of a much larger corporate strategy, a strategy that, unlike anything before, extended beyond cards into licensing, e-commerce, live shopping, marketplace infrastructure, auctions, and events. Fanatics in 2022 was already valued at approximately $27 billion, reaching $31 billion in a December 2022 funding round. Topps, inside that structure, was going to be one node in a much larger system.

Nat Turner, the CEO of Collectors Holdings (PSA's parent), captured the industry reaction bluntly in an interview with Sports Card Investor: "Holy crap, Michael Rubin just pulled an end-around on the industry." He credited Fanatics' "big valuations" and "great relationships with the leagues" and said he was "incredibly impressed that Fanatics could pull that off."

Ken Goldin, founder of Goldin Auctions, offered the balanced take that turned out closest to reality. In a December 2022 interview with The Athletic, Goldin said, "This is going to be their industry. The success of modern cards and newly released cards are going to be on their shoulders. They made an aggressive bet." His qualifier, in a separate interview with Outkick, landed where most collector concerns did: if Fanatics "does the right thing they can revive the trading card industry," but they "have to do it correctly."

That tension, between the scale Fanatics could bring and the concentration collectors worried about, is the frame for everything that followed.

What Fanatics Built Afterward

Fanatics did not buy Topps to sit on it. Inside the next two and a half years, it built an entire ecosystem around the brand that turned Topps from a card manufacturer into the public face of a vertically integrated collectibles platform.

Fanatics Live launched on July 26, 2023, with its debut at the 2023 MLB All-Star Game in Seattle. Led by former Snap and Google executive Nick Bell, it's a livestream commerce platform purpose-built for trading cards, breaks, memorabilia, and limited drops. Unlike Whatnot or eBay Live, Fanatics Live has first-party access to Topps IP, Fanatics-owned athlete content, and the full Fanatics licensing portfolio. When Topps returned to NBA cards in October 2025, its celebrity-hosted launch breaks ran through Fanatics Live.

PWCC, the dominant high-end card auction house with sales approaching $250 million in 2021, was acquired in May 2023. Fanatics retained all ~125 employees and the Oregon vault facility. The deal price was not disclosed.

Fanatics Collect launched in June 2024 as a full marketplace supporting fixed-price listings, auctions, vaulting, authentication, and integration with PSA, CGC, SGC, and Beckett. Fanatics set seller fees at 6% for cards under $120, positioned directly against eBay's 13.25%, and folded PWCC into the new platform, effectively retiring the PWCC brand. A high-end auction partnership with Sotheby's followed in September 2024, headlined by a 1948 Leaf Jackie Robinson PSA 8 with a $275,000 to $350,000 pre-sale estimate.

Fanatics Fest held its inaugural event August 16–18, 2024, at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan. Pre-event projections targeted 50,000 attendees. Actual turnout exceeded 70,000 across 450,000 square feet, with 350+ dealer booths and a 10,000-square-foot Fanatics Superstore. Headliners included Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, Kevin Durant, Peyton and Eli Manning, Jay-Z, and Travis Scott. The 2025 edition drew 125,000-plus attendees across three days. Fanatics Fest is now the largest hobby-adjacent event in the world.

In two and a half years, Fanatics built a near-complete vertical stack around Topps: manufacturing, live commerce, marketplace, high-end auctions, vaulting, grading integration, and event infrastructure. No company in hobby history has built anything close to this breadth in this compressed a timeline.

The Licensing Endgame

Licensing is the hinge everything else swings on. A trading card company without official league and player rights is, with rare exceptions, producing something collectors will discount heavily. Which is why the way Fanatics' licensing portfolio has rolled out — one major league at a time, over a four-year period, matters more than any single product release.

Baseball was the starting point. Fanatics' MLBPA exclusive began in 2023 when Topps' and Panini's union rights expired, and the MLB league-level exclusive begins in 2026. For the full 2026 MLB season forward, Topps-under-Fanatics is the only company producing licensed MLB cards of any kind.

Basketball returned on October 15, 2025, when Fanatics, the NBA, and the NBPA announced a multi-year exclusive partnership. The 2025-26 Topps Basketball release launched October 23, 2025, fronted by No. 1 overall pick Cooper Flagg, with Magic Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, and Dwyane Wade in supporting inserts. It was Topps' first licensed NBA product since 2010-11. Panini had held the NBA exclusive for fifteen years. It ended.

Football comes next. Panini's NFL and NFLPA exclusive ends March 31, 2026, closing a run that began in 2009. Topps takes over with fully licensed NFL cards in April 2026, leading with 2025 Topps Chrome Football on April 15, Topps' first licensed NFL set since 2016. Per Yahoo Sports, Fanatics offered Panini more than $2 billion in 2022 to walk away from the NFL and NBA exclusives early. Panini declined.

Soccer is the emerging frontier. Panini holds the FIFA World Cup 2026 and 2030 global rights, but The Athletic reported in April 2026 that sticker and card rights for England, Brazil, Germany, and Italy national teams are moving to Fanatics between 2027 and 2035, a quiet but significant erosion of Panini's historical soccer stronghold. Hockey remains with Upper Deck, the current NHL and NHLPA licensee. WNBA stays with Panini, which renewed its WNBPA deal in 2025, reportedly the most lucrative women's sports licensing agreement ever signed.

The cumulative picture is simple. By the end of 2026, Fanatics-owned Topps will be the exclusive licensed trading card producer for the three highest-value sports properties in North America. That is the single most significant licensing shift in the history of the hobby.

The Numbers Tell a Story

The easiest way to evaluate whether the Fanatics acquisition worked, from a business standpoint, is to look at what happened to Topps' revenue.

In 2020, the trading card business Fanatics would eventually buy generated approximately $368 million. By 2024, Topps' trading card revenue had grown to approximately $1.6 billion, a roughly fourfold increase in four years. Part of that is the pandemic-era hobby boom extending into 2021 and 2022. A larger part is Fanatics' pricing, licensing, and distribution strategy taking hold: higher average price points on flagship products, expanded release calendars, and direct-to-consumer leverage through Topps.com and Fanatics Live.

The price shift is visible on the ground. A 2023 Topps Update baseball hobby box averaged approximately $110 at launch. The 2024 equivalent averaged approximately $140, a 27% year-over-year increase. Premium products have moved further: 2024 Topps Pristine hobby boxes have traded between $485 and $925, with recent listings around $700. The hobby's post-2021 "correction" narrative is real for singles in specific areas, but Fanatics-era flagship sealed product has trended up, not down.

At the parent level, Fanatics Inc. reported $8.1 billion in 2024 revenue, up 15% year over year, with Rubin guiding to $9 billion-plus in 2025 and roughly $12 billion in 2026. Fanatics Collectibles contributed approximately $1.6 billion of that, growing 40% year over year, and is guided to top $2 billion in 2025 and $3 billion in 2026. Trading cards are Fanatics' highest-margin business segment.

Whatever you think of Fanatics' broader strategy, the numbers do not describe a business that was acquired to be squeezed. They describe a business being invested in, scaled aggressively, and positioned as a growth engine for a much larger parent.

The Panini Pushback and the Lawsuits

No story about Fanatics' rise is complete without Panini's response. In August 2023, Panini filed a Sherman Act and Clayton Act antitrust suit against Fanatics in the Southern District of New York (Case 1:23-cv-09714), alleging Fanatics had built a monopoly over licensed trading cards through the combination of its 2021 league and player-association exclusives, its aggressive hiring from Panini's ranks, and its post-acquisition integration of Topps. Fanatics counter-sued (Case 1:23-cv-06895), citing state-law unfair competition and tortious interference around employee departures. Panini had already sued separately after approximately 34 of its employees departed for Fanatics in a single week in 2023.

On March 10, 2025, Judge Oetken issued a mixed ruling. Parts of Panini's complaint were dismissed, but the core monopolization claims survived and are proceeding to discovery. A separate direct-buyer antitrust case filed by Scaturo against Fanatics was dismissed in March 2026 on pleading grounds.

Panini itself has not gone quiet. It retained the FIFA World Cup 2026 and 2030 rights, released its official sticker collection and Adrenalyn XL cards for the tournament, and has been increasing production on its final licensed NFL cycle to maximize output before March 31, 2026. Post-2026, Panini is expected to pivot toward unlicensed products, international soccer where it still holds rights, and smaller properties where no exclusive has been taken. Whether the company can sustain its scale without the NFL or NBA is the single most important unanswered business question in the hobby.

Consolidation on Both Sides of the Hobby

What makes the Fanatics story genuinely unprecedented isn't only its own scale, it's that the mirror-image consolidation is happening simultaneously on the authentication side of the hobby.

Collectors Holdings, led by CEO Nat Turner, acquired PSA's parent, Collectors Universe, in a $700 million deal announced November 30, 2020 and closed in early 2021. In February 2024, Collectors acquired SGC, keeping it as an independent brand. In December 2025, Collectors acquired Beckett Grading Services, again keeping it independent. By the end of 2025, three of the four major grading companies, PSA, SGC, and Beckett, all sat inside the same corporate parent. CGC is the last independent. PSA alone graded approximately 8.2 million cards in 2025 and holds roughly 70% of the grading market by volume.

Fanatics has consolidated manufacturing and licensing. Collectors has consolidated authentication and grading. Two vertical monopolies are forming on opposite sides of the hobby stack, and between them, they now touch every meaningful stage of a card's life from print run to slab to resale. A collector buying a 2026 Topps Chrome Football box, getting the hit graded by PSA, and selling the slab through Fanatics Collect is moving through a single-company experience at every step except the moment of purchase. That's the real structure of the modern hobby, and the Fanatics-Topps deal is the piece that made it possible.

Has This Been Good for Collectors?

The honest answer is mixed but leans positive.

On the positive side, the hobby is more visible, better funded, and more legitimized as a mainstream pursuit than at any point since the junk wax era. Topps product quality has improved materially, recent Chrome and Pristine releases across multiple sports include patches, signatures, and print-run scarcity that prior-era Topps simply did not have. Licensing uncertainty is effectively resolved for MLB, the NBA, and the NFL. Fanatics Collect has pressured eBay's seller fees downward, which directly benefits collectors selling in the $10 to $500 range. And the investment in vaulting, authentication integration, and live commerce has reduced friction in several places collectors used to complain about.

The concerns are equally real. More vertical integration creates convenience, but it also creates structural leverage. When one company influences product, manufacturing, live commerce, marketplace listings, auctions, events, and collector access simultaneously, that company's internal decisions affect hobby-wide outcomes in ways no previous operator's decisions did. The 27% year-over-year price increase on Topps Update from 2023 to 2024 is the kind of move that would have produced more market pushback in a more competitive environment. The Panini antitrust case, regardless of its outcome, will shape the rules of the road for years. And the co-consolidation with Collectors Holdings means collectors are increasingly navigating a hobby operated by two companies, not twenty.

The fairest summary is this: Fanatics has invested in the hobby at a scale no prior operator came close to, and collectors are better off for that investment in most concrete ways. Whether the long-run balance of power is healthy for the category is a different question, and it's too early to know.

What This Means for the Future of the Hobby

The Fanatics-Topps deal, seen in full, now looks less like an acquisition and more like the first move in a reconfiguration of the entire trading card economy. That reconfiguration favors integrated operators over product-first companies. It favors direct-to-consumer distribution over wholesale-driven supply chains. It favors live commerce and events over passive retail. And it increasingly positions trading cards as a fan and entertainment category rather than a niche collector hobby.

That framing matters for how collectors should plan. The traditional hobby, shop visits, card shows, graded singles from independent auction houses, trading networks outside any platform, does not disappear. But it increasingly sits inside larger systems than it used to. Understanding those systems is the difference between collectors who see shifts coming and collectors who find out about them at the point of purchase.

As cards move through more polished, more visible, and more connected channels, the after-purchase side of the hobby matters proportionally more too. Storage, protection, and presentation have always mattered to serious collectors, but in an ecosystem where individual cards are more visible, more valuable, and more easily tracked across marketplaces, the cost of damage is higher than it used to be. A brand like Card Capsule fits into that reality as supporting infrastructure, not a lead character in the Fanatics story, but a practical piece of how collectors protect what they're buying in a more valuable, more integrated market.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Fanatics buy Topps, and for how much?

Fanatics completed the acquisition on January 4, 2022, at a reported price of approximately $500 million. The deal covered Topps' sports and entertainment trading card business, including ~350 employees and operations in 10 countries. Topps' candy and gift card businesses were spun off into a separate entity called Bazooka Companies.

Why did Topps sell to Fanatics?

Topps lost its MLB and MLBPA trading card licenses to Fanatics on August 19, 2021, which triggered the collapse of its $1.3 billion SPAC merger with Mudrick Capital one day later. Without its crown-jewel baseball license, Topps' value as a standalone business dropped materially, and Michael Eisner's Tornante Company, the majority owner since 2007, sold the trading card division to Fanatics five months later.

Did Topps go away after the acquisition?

No. Topps remains the active, public-facing trading card brand inside Fanatics Collectibles. Topps' trading card revenue grew from approximately $368 million in 2020 to approximately $1.6 billion in 2024 under Fanatics ownership.

When does Fanatics take over NFL trading cards?

Panini's exclusive NFL and NFLPA license ends March 31, 2026. Topps takes over the exclusive on April 1, 2026, with its first release, 2025 Topps Chrome Football, launching April 15, 2026.

What about Panini?

Panini filed an antitrust suit against Fanatics in August 2023 alleging monopolization. In March 2025, a federal judge dismissed parts of the complaint but allowed the core monopolization claims to proceed to discovery. Panini retains FIFA World Cup 2026 and 2030 rights and continues producing soccer and other non-exclusive products, but its NBA and NFL exclusives are ending.

Has the acquisition been good for collectors?

Mixed but leaning positive. Product quality, licensing clarity, marketplace infrastructure, and live commerce have all improved under Fanatics. Prices on flagship sealed product have risen, the 2024 Topps Update hobby box jumped 27% year over year, and the degree of vertical integration raises real long-term concentration concerns. Collectors are clearly getting more, but they're also paying more and operating inside a more consolidated market than they were before.

The Bottom Line

When Fanatics bought Topps in January 2022, the headline read like a normal corporate acquisition. Four years of hindsight has changed the frame entirely. The deal was not one company buying another, it was the final step in a months-long sequence that stripped Topps of the MLB license that defined it, collapsed its public listing, and delivered it into the hands of the operator best positioned to build something much larger around it.

What Fanatics built is no longer speculation. It's a vertically integrated collectibles operation that owns manufacturing, licensing, live commerce, marketplaces, auctions, vaulting, and events, anchored by a Topps brand that has grown 4x in revenue in four years and now produces cards under exclusive MLB, NBA, and soon-to-be NFL rights. On the other side of the hobby, Collectors Holdings has executed a mirror-image consolidation of grading. Between them, two companies now shape the modern trading card economy more completely than any single operator ever has.

For collectors, the takeaway isn't cynicism and it isn't celebration. It's awareness. The cards you buy, the grades you chase, the marketplaces you sell through, and the events you attend all increasingly run through the same two operators. That reality isn't going away. Understanding it, and collecting inside it with your eyes open, is the actual job now.

The Fanatics-Topps acquisition wasn't just a moment. It was the turning point that made the current hobby look the way it does.