Fanatics, and the Hobby

You can love sports cards and hate the company that now runs them. That is the exact spot a lot of collectors find themselves in heading into 2026, and it is not irrational. One company, Fanatics, now controls the licenses, owns Topps, owns two of the biggest marketplaces, runs the largest live-selling platform, and throws the biggest convention. This is an honest look at how that happened, what the lawsuits actually decided (and did not), whether the “it’s gambling now” panic holds up, and the real ways people are still collecting without feeling used.

How Fanatics Took Over the Hobby in Five Years

This did not happen gradually. It happened in a tight sequence of moves, and seeing them in order explains why collectors feel blindsided.

When	What Happened
2021	Fanatics wins future exclusive league/union card licenses for MLB, the NBA, and the NFL through direct deals, slated to begin as Topps’ and Panini’s existing deals expire.
Jan 2022	Fanatics buys the Topps trading card business for roughly $500 million, after the MLB license win had already torpedoed Topps’ planned IPO.
2022-2023	Panini’s MLB player-association rights lapse. Fanatics declines to simply buy Panini; instead it takes the licenses through negotiation. Dozens of Panini staff leave for Fanatics.
Aug 2023	Panini sues Fanatics, alleging anticompetitive conduct, tortious interference, and an attempt to monopolize the licensed card market. Fanatics countersues.
Oct 2025	Panini’s NBA exclusive ends; Fanatics/Topps takes over basketball.
Mar 31, 2026	Panini’s NFL exclusive ends after 15-plus years. Fanatics/Topps becomes the exclusive NFL card maker on April 1, 2026.

The scale of what that built is hard to overstate. Topps trading card revenue grew from $368 million in 2020, the last year before the takeover, to roughly $1.6 billion in 2024, a fourfold jump. The founder, Michael Rubin, did not corner the market by buying his rival. He did something harder: he made the rival’s product legally impossible to make.

“Fanatics has made it clear that it does not want me as a customer” is so real.

u/Bravefan212 (r/baseballcards, 203 upvotes)

That comment is the single most upvoted line in the data, and it captures the grief better than any statistic. It is not anger at a bad product. It is the feeling of being designed out of a hobby you were already in.

The Monopoly Question, and What the Lawsuits Actually Decided

This is where Reddit and the courtroom diverge, and getting it right matters. The hobby talks as if a monopoly conviction is a formality. The legal record is genuinely mixed, and the distinction is not a technicality.

There are two separate cases, and they went opposite directions:

• The consumer class action (Scaturo v. Fanatics) was dismissed. Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain ruled that none of the named plaintiffs adequately showed they had overpaid for cards, an absence of standing. It was first dismissed without prejudice, then dismissed with prejudice on June 2, 2026, after the plaintiffs voluntarily ended it. Fanatics called it “a baseless and fundamentally flawed lawsuit.” Note what the dismissal does and does not mean: it found the buyers could not prove personal harm, not that Fanatics was cleared of monopolizing.
• Panini’s antitrust suit went the other way. In March 2025 the court trimmed some claims but let the core monopolization allegation survive into discovery. The same judge found Panini adequately pleaded that Fanatics holds monopoly power through its ability to set prices and exclude rivals. Discovery runs through the end of 2026, and a trial, if it happens, is expected around 2027 to 2028.

Why Your Local Card Shop Is Disappearing

The monopoly debate feels abstract until it closes the shop down the street. The mechanism collectors describe is real and brutal in its simplicity.

They are being charged close to retail, where Topps can sell for whatever price they want, since they make the product… The small card shop can’t compete.

u/newarrior_1602 (r/sportscards, 12 upvotes)

When the manufacturer also sells direct to consumers, the shop buying wholesale is competing against its own supplier, at a price the supplier sets. Add allocation systems that route the best product to high-volume buyers and breakers first, and a local shop can be left paying near-retail for inventory it then cannot mark up. Another collector described the allocation-to-market-price flip in plain terms.

all of the good sports stuff is going to be “allocated”… Then when the product hits release date… it changes to “market price” meaning they will be selling it to you for what it sells for on the secondary market.

u/ReflectionGloomy8851 (r/sportscards, 19 upvotes)

Prices, Overproduction, and Dynamic Pricing

The pain shows up three ways at once, and they compound. Prices spike at release through dynamic pricing, so hobby boxes for 2025 Topps Chrome Update routinely landed between $320 and $350, with early access tilted toward high-volume buyers. At the same time, production exploded: total 2025 Topps Update output reached about 228.25 million cards, a 39.8 percent jump from 2024. Paying more for a product that is simultaneously less scarce is the worst of both worlds, and it is the core of the value complaint. Quality control also slipped, with widespread reports of corner damage, surface scratches, and foil crimps on premium product.

To be fair to Fanatics, it has a counter-narrative worth stating. It says it won its deals “fair and square, one at a time,” that it is simply moving to a direct-to-consumer model, and it has added collector-facing measures: a Grade Guarantee, longer grade validity, and a reduced redemption backlog. It also commissioned a KPMG audit of its Texas printing and collation process, which Fanatics says found no evidence that high-value cards are seeded into specific boxes for breakers, shops, or celebrities. Whether you trust an audit the company paid for is your call, but it exists, and pretending it does not would be dishonest.

Is This Collecting, or Is It Gambling Now?

This is the most serious accusation in the data, and it is part true and part overheated.

They have created these products as a game of chance disguised as “investment” opportunities… people think they can get rich quick for a minimal investment. But in reality, they are building debt one hanger box at a time.

u/PadresAutoGuy (r/baseballcards, 10 upvotes)

The pack-as-lottery-ticket structure is real, and the part critics are most right about is the funnel: Fanatics runs a sportsbook, and collectors have documented promos that push betting “fancash” toward card buying, which genuinely blurs the line between collecting and gambling. One collector openly gamed that funnel in reverse.

So it cost me $20 in bets on the fanatics sports betting app to get my free $400 “fanatics cash”, which I then used to buy 16 blaster boxes.

u/Photif (r/baseballcards, 10 upvotes)

Where the claim overreaches: cards are not legally classified as gambling today, and most jurisdictions still treat them as collectibles. And the hobby was drifting toward chase-driven, hit-or-bust spending well before Fanatics existed, back to the $30 hit-guarantee packs of the mid-2000s. Fanatics accelerated the trend hard. It did not invent it. Calling every pack “gambling” is sentiment; flagging the sportsbook-to-cards funnel as a real problem is accurate.

How Collectors Are Actually Buying Around Fanatics

This is the useful part, and it is more upbeat than the rest. The people who got past the grief mostly did it by changing what they collect, not by quitting. Here is the playbook that shows up over and over in the threads.

For this exact reason, over the past few years I’ve moved away from cards and started collecting autographs. Licensed, unlicensed, card, ball, picture, whatever. Usually can find who I’m looking for cheaper than whatever super Duper rainbow mega ultra banana refractor they come out with.

u/retromobile (r/baseballcards, 30 upvotes)

I realized several months later I don’t care what other flippers or fanatics is doing. I’m collecting what I like and displaying it for myself with no concern over comps or sealed product prices.

u/ReallyNickYoung (r/baseballcards, 65 upvotes)

The Honest Counterpoint

Not everyone in the data is furious, and the dissent deserves a fair hearing because some of it is correct.

A company decided to end its reliance on brick and morter distribution and move to a direct to consumer ecommerce model… They have monopoly only on the license, which is often the case when someone grants a license.

u/fast1727 (r/sportscards, 32 upvotes)

That is a real argument. An exclusive license is, by design, exclusive; leagues have always granted them. The legitimate antitrust question is not “does Fanatics have exclusives,” it is whether it acquired them through anticompetitive conduct and whether it leverages them to harm competition and consumers. That is precisely the question Panini’s surviving case will test, and precisely the question the dismissed consumer case failed to prove. Reasonable people land in different places on it, and the courts have not finished.

What to Watch Next

The real signal is not the next product drop, it is the Panini discovery process running through the end of 2026. If internal licensing contracts and revenue-sharing terms surface and show coordinated price effects, the pressure on Fanatics jumps. If they show ordinary licensing, the monopoly narrative weakens. Either way, the structural fight, Fanatics versus Panini, is the one that could actually change the hobby, far more than any individual buyer’s complaint. Until it resolves, the practical move is the one collectors already figured out: collect what you love, on your terms, in the lanes Fanatics does not control.

Sources & Methodology