If you’ve been paying attention to the hobby over the last few months, you know there’s been some big moves cooking.
First, in a surprising move last August, Fanatics, Inc. acquired the MLB/MLBPA player licenses to print trading cards, to begin in the year 2023. Fanatics also acquired the NBA (2025) and NFL (2026) licenses. According to most reports, Fanatics paid ten times what Topps and Panini, the current license holders, were willing to pay.
This is because Fanatics, a global sports apparel distribution company, is worth about ten times what Topps and Panini are worth. Recent reports suggest they are worth around $18 billion.
But the big question on most collectors’ minds since August has been: what will Fanatics do with the licenses?
Will they establish new trading card brands? Will they build new infrastructure for designing, printing, and distributing sports cards? Or will they buy out already popular and well established brands like Topps and Panini to jump start their new empire?
Those questions have now been answered.
Fanatics buys Topps for $500 million
News came down late last week that Fanatics bought Topps for a reported $500 million, though many seem to think the actual purchase amount was more than that.
This means that all of your favorite Topps brands, including the flagship product, Chrome, Finest, Five Star, Tier One, and everything else, are likely not going anywhere. Bowman, which is owned by Topps, may have different guidelines than Topps, especially as it relates to rookie cards, but in all likelihood, it isn’t going anywhere either.
So Topps, and all of its brands, is here to stay.
As for NBA and NFL cards, there has not yet been any news on Fanatics buying the current license holder, Panini America. But since Fanatics already purchased the licenses for those leagues, I’d expect an announcement coming soon. Upper Deck still owns the license and trading card brands for the NHL; that doesn’t seem likely to change soon.
So since Topps is still around, how does this news affect hobbyists and collectors?
Collectors benefit while Fanatics profits
First and foremost, if you are a vintage baseball collector, none of this news means much. Vintage cards are vintage for a reason. They are a relic of the past and symbolize an era of the hobby that is no more. And therein lies the appeal: collecting nostalgia has been a key tenet of sports card collecting since its inception in the 19th Century.
So the fact that Fanatics bought Topps doesn’t likely impact your desire to complete your 1962 Topps set or to find that near mint 1954 Topps Ted Williams.
But it could affect the value of your vintage cards.
Consider that whenever a manufacturer or card brand leaves the market, for any reason, that manufacturer’s products tend to see a decline in value. From mid 1960’s Philadelphia Football to mid 1980’s Fleer baseball to all the brands that came and went in the 1990’s (Pacific, Aurora, Pinnacle, etc.), the brands that don’t have “lasting impact” on the hobby tend to lose their value over time.
Note that I’m not arguing these aren’t good brands; plenty of those brands I mentioned fetch good prices on the secondary market. But none of them have the same consistent value of Topps or Bowman or even Panini in today’s market.
So in a way, vintage collectors scored a win with this news. The brand they have collected for decades survives the modern economy. For all intents and purposes, nothing regarding Topps baseball cards will change for the average consumer.
Topps, a great American company that’s been around for over 70 years, will continue to be on the shelves of your favorite hobby stores.
The main thing that changes? Who rakes in all the money.
Fanatics will likely make a huge profit off this deal. They don’t have to spend much on building brands, because Topps already did that. They may develop new brands or revise old ones, but Topps already has the designers and the infrastructure to do that.
All Fanatics has to do is apply their revolutionary distribution model to the cards market (something that will definitely impact the collector positively; Topps’ distribution was decades old and left a lot to be desired) and then watch the money pour in.
The hobby’s past and future are now secure
Overall, this acquisition is great news for the hobby.
As with any market, the health of the card collecting hobby relies on both the value of the vintage market and the business opportunity in the modern market. The two eras, vintage and modern, impact one another. If the vintage market has no appeal, the modern market doesn’t have a foundation to build on. If the modern market crumbles, the vintage market risks being forgotten.
You could say Fanatics buying Topps is a “necessary evil” to keep the vintage market alive. There’s going to be changes, and likely some that collectors will resent, but keeping the Topps brand in the minds of new generations is important. If baseball fans in the coming decades aren’t seeing the Topps brand married with baseball, they might forget the relationship ever existed.
In the coming months, we will see the true impact of Fanatics on the baseball card industry. I expect we will see some changes to the way cards are distributed and packed out, as well as we may see hobby shops impacted in their allocation or wholesale costs, but overall the collector will still see the same brands with the same “Topps” logo on the front.