A Topps football card has a nostalgic feel to it. For many collectors, the smell of a new pack of cards and the slight resistance before the first card slides out take them back to their childhood. While that was going on, there were no NFL logos, team jerseys, or official branding for almost ten years. Topps was not allowed to get in. That has changed now, in a quiet but important way.
The reunion was confirmed earlier this year by the NFL, Fanatics Collectibles (Topps’ parent company), and the NFL Players Association. Topps is back as the league’s only trading card partner. Since 2016, this is the first time the name “Topps” has been on an official NFL product. For collectors who have been doing this for a long time, that’s not a small detail. That’s news that’s worth hearing.
There’s more to the timing than meets the eye at first glance. In the past five years, the trading card business has gone through something really strange. During the pandemic, people who were stuck at home took up a hobby that didn’t go away when the restrictions were lifted. There was even more depth to it. On a slow day, rare cards sell for a few thousand dollars. On a busy day, they sell for millions of dollars. Reports say that since 2019, sales of NFL cards have gone up by almost six times. That kind of number stops executives in their tracks and makes them pay attention.
Mike Mahan, CEO of Fanatics Collectibles, says that he has been getting ready for this moment for years. What’s interesting is the language he keeps using to talk about what Topps plans to do with the license. It seems like he talks about “storytelling” a lot. Stories, not just the launch of a product or a run of copies. In this case, it means that a trading card should feel like it holds something real, not just a picture.
This way of thinking is most clear in the two big new features that come with the 2025 Topps Chrome Football set. The Rookie PREM1ERE Patch Autograph Cards have real patches that first-round rookies like Jaxon Dart and Cam Ward wore in their very first NFL regular-season games. Patches like those were taken off of jerseys and sewn into cards. The NFL Honors Gold Shield series also has patches that 2024 award winners, like Josh Allen and Saquon Barkley, wore during real games. It’s a move away from fake scarcity and toward something with a more honest history—a real thing that was there.
It’s kind of surprising that the NFL had never really gone all out with game-worn gear in its cards before. Different teams had done it on their own, in different places and ways. The league’s senior vice president of consumer products, Casey Collins, said that Topps pushed the company to close that gap. There’s a sense that the league knew it was missing out on something valuable, both in terms of money and connecting with fans.
It’s still not clear how all of this will affect the collector community as a whole. Since Topps last had this license, the hobby has changed a lot. Unboxing videos on social media now bring a lot of attention and demand. If someone films and posts a single rare pull, it can change the market value of a card in hours. Mahan seems to be very aware of that pressure; he’s so aware that he’s already warning against putting out too many new products at once.
What comes next between Topps, Fanatics, and the NFL will be seen in years of releases and how collectors react to them. It will be out in the middle of April. It’s really not clear if it will work out the way the industry hopes. There hasn’t been a Topps NFL card in almost ten years, so the reunion itself is worth noticing. It’s like a missing piece has quietly been put back together.
