People who collect sports cards have thought for a long time that Fanatics would eventually just buy Panini. It seemed to make sense. Topps was bought by Fanatics in 2021 for about $500 million. Panini was the only company licensed to make NBA and NFL trading cards, which are two of the most valuable properties in the collecting world. It seemed like the right thing to do to do a buyout, which is a clean form of corporate consolidation that makes the market less chaotic. It didn’t happen that way.
Instead, Michael Rubin and Fanatics did something that seems harder and maybe even more violent now that we look back on it. They went all the way around Panini. To make a new licensing system from scratch, Fanatics talked directly with the MLB Players Association, the NBA Players Association, and the NFL Players Association. This new system didn’t include Panini. Panini has lost the three American league exclusives that made its business strong for more than 15 years. First, it lost baseball in 2023, then basketball in October 2025, and finally football on April 1, 2026. Not by buying something. Through swapping out.
As this plays out, it seems like the hobby didn’t realize how structurally weak a business that depends on licenses really is. Panini’s rise in America was based on the same kind of reshuffle. Upper Deck and Topps lost their basketball licenses from the NBA in 2009, and Panini, a company that was new to American sports cards, was given the category. At the time, this was seen as an attempt to bring the categories together. After a year, Upper Deck also lost the NFL license. In just a few years, Panini had built what looked like an unbeatable lead in U.S. sports cards. They might have believed in their own strength.
You should read the Upper Deck story because it gives you the best idea of what happens to a card company when they lose their license. Upper Deck kept making baseball cards after they lost MLB in 2009. They did this under a deal with the Players Association that only let them use names and likenesses, but not team logos, uniforms, or colors. MLB sued them when they tried to use team marks anyway. Upper Deck had to pay more than $2.4 million in back fees and were limited in what they could draw after the case was over in early 2010. In baseball, they never fully got better. The business still exists, but it has focused on NHL and entertainment properties. It’s not even close to the size it used to be.
This time, Panini has to deal with the same math problem on a bigger scale. The company isn’t small—it made between €1.6 billion and €1.9 billion in global sales in 2024, does business in 150 countries, and still has a huge international sticker business that started decades before it tried to get into the American sports card business. In 1961, the Panini brothers started the whole thing in Modena by selling used soccer stickers in new packages for 10 lire each. The first FIFA World Cup sticker albums came out in 1970. In the 1970s, the company expanded around the world. This place has real history and real staying power outside of North America.
But the American sports card market—especially Prizm basketball and football—was built on licenses that Panini no longer has. These were the high-end, graded cards that made Panini famous among collectors in the U.S. It’s still not clear how many of those people follow the license and how many follow the brand. This is a hobby that has seen both.
Over the course of several years, Fanatics has quietly built something that the industry hadn’t seen before: a company that didn’t just compete for licenses but changed the whole licensing system so that the leagues and players’ associations now have shares in the new business. What you have there is not like a normal licensee relationship. It lines up incentives in a way that makes it harder to compete in the future.
It’s a whole different question whether Fanatics can actually make things that collectors want. Getting licenses and making cards that people want are two different skills. That part is still being looked into.
