The beginning of this story feels almost emotional. Topps. Football. A deal for more than one year. For people who grew up in the 1970s or 1980s and remember taking cards out of packs, this sounds less like a business announcement and more like a welcome home.
But don’t get the wrong idea—what Fanatics Collectibles has made here is not a throwback. It is a plan. And it’s a big bet that was made with a lot of thought.
The NFL, Fanatics Collectibles, and the NFL Players Association just signed a new multi-year licensing agreement that lets Topps make all NFL trading cards. The first item made possible by this partnership, 2025 Topps Chrome Football, came out in April and can be bought at hobby shops, Fanatics Live, and NFLShop.com. Topps had an NFL-only set for the first time since 2016, when Panini took over and ruled the market for almost a decade. That ten years are now over.
This is much more than just a licensing deal for Fanatics. After buying Topps outright in 2022, the company is now in a good position to control every major part of the NFL trading card pipeline. This includes the license, the brand, the distribution, and more and more, the market where cards are bought and sold. It’s not often that companies that deal with collectibles work together in that way. It’s also the kind of move that changes an entire industry in a quiet way, until collectors wake up one day and see that everything has changed.
It’s impossible not to notice the time. The last few months have been some of the most volatile in recent memory for the sports card market. Prices went through the roof during the pandemic, and millions of new collectors joined. Eventually, there was a correction that made some parts of the hobby feel uncertain. As fans watched all of this, they decided to move toward consolidation instead of being careful.
Michael Rubin and the rest of the Fanatics leadership team seem to really believe that the collectibles market has more long-term growth ahead of it than just speculation. They see long-term collector engagement tied to live events, digital platforms, and loyalty ecosystems. The deal between Topps and the NFL fits this thesis very well. If you own the only official NFL card, you have a strong way to reach a huge group of fans.
It’s still not clear if collectors will be as excited about this as the business case suggests. The hobby and being exclusive aren’t easy to understand. In some ways, having only one licensee can be better for quality control, product releases, and the market as a whole. But even though it was messy, the competition between Topps and Panini gave collectors more choices, a wider range of prices, and sometimes really creative products.
As of right now, it looks like 2025 Topps Chrome Football got a good response, at least based on what hobby shops said after it came out. Chrome has been a fan favorite for a long time, and making it available again under a new brand name was a smart first step. It shows that Fanatics knows how to make people feel about old products.
The more interesting question is what comes next. Fans have everything they need: the brand, the license, and the platform. It will likely depend on decisions made in product rooms and price meetings that most fans will never see whether this is a truly collector-friendly era or a tightly managed corporate one. It doesn’t feel like the end of this story; instead, it feels like the end of the first chapter of something much bigger.
