Fanatics Fest NYC wrapped up Sunday at the Javits Center — four days, roughly 200,000 attendees, 25 percent more floor space than last year, timed perfectly to the World Cup Final weekend. It looked like a celebration of sports fandom. It was also, if you squinted, a shareholder presentation.
Michael Rubin’s company is worth somewhere between $25 billion and $33 billion depending on which funding round or Fidelity valuation you consult. It holds exclusive retail and fan apparel licensing rights for the NFL, NBA, and MLB. It owns Topps, which it acquired in January 2022 for around $500 million and now operates under long-term exclusive trading card licenses with the NFL, NBA, and MLB players associations — 20 years for baseball, shorter terms for football and basketball but exclusive regardless. It runs a sportsbook generating $850 million in revenue in 2025, now live in 23 states. The NHL signed a 10-year exclusive jersey deal starting with the 2024-25 season. There are very few major revenue streams left in American sports commerce that Fanatics does not either own outright or control through exclusivity agreements.
Rubin himself said it plainly at Fanatics Fest in a CNBC interview this past Friday: “We believe we have probably the biggest opportunity in sports because it’s not like we’re in one specific business… I think of us really as a platform that gives a digital sports fan everything they want.”
That sentence is doing a lot of work. What he’s describing — a platform that gives fans “everything” — is also a description of a company with no meaningful competition.
The trading card market is the clearest example of how this plays out on the ground. When Fanatics locked up those MLB, NFL, and NBA licenses, it pushed Panini — the longtime dominant player in basketball and football cards — entirely out of those markets. Panini’s antitrust lawsuit against Fanatics is still ongoing. In the meantime, collectors have watched Topps card set prices climb more than 50 percent. That’s not a market outcome. That’s what happens when you eliminate the competition and then price accordingly.
The #EndFanatics hashtag trended after Super Bowl jersey shortages left fans unable to buy team gear during the biggest retail moment of the football calendar. A major consumer class action was filed and then dismissed in June 2026 on standing grounds — meaning a federal court didn’t rule that Fanatics was behaving well, just that the plaintiffs hadn’t established the right to sue in that particular configuration. The underlying complaints about pricing and availability didn’t go anywhere.
It’s worth being precise about what Fanatics is and isn’t doing. Rubin was direct at Fanatics Fest when asked about ticketing: “Ticketing is a hard business… lots of competitors. The content providers, the teams and artists, keep all the money, which is the way it should be. So that’s a business we’re never going to get into.” That’s a real constraint, and it matters — ticketing is the one major fan-facing sports commerce category that remains genuinely contested. Fanatics’ arrangement with resale platforms is an integration, not an incursion.
But the rest of the map is largely colored in Fanatics blue. Jerseys. Trading cards. Sports betting. Licensed collectibles. And now an annual festival at the Javits Center that functions simultaneously as a consumer event, a brand activation, and a reminder to every league partner in attendance that Fanatics is the infrastructure underneath all of it.
The leagues signed these deals — many of them 10- and 20-year exclusives — because Fanatics offered capital, scale, and operational competence that league-run licensing programs couldn’t match. That logic made sense individually, for each sport, at each negotiating table. The cumulative effect is that one company now controls the material relationship between professional sports and its fans across merchandise, collectibles, and gambling. The leagues were busy negotiating TV rights. Fanatics was buying everything else.
Whether this ends badly for fans depends almost entirely on whether Rubin’s “platform” instinct ever collides with Fanatics’ monopoly pricing incentives. Right now, those two things are in tension. The festival draws 200,000 people and generates goodwill. The card price hikes erode it. At some point, the leverage gets used — it always does.
