What Is Fanatics?

Fanaticsis a privately held sports merchandise and commerce company, led by founder and CEO Michael Rubin and headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. Its original and still largest business is licensed sports apparel and merchandise — it operates the official online stores for MLB, the NFL, the NBA, and dozens of individual pro and college teams. Starting in 2021, Fanatics pushed hard into a second business line: trading cards and collectibles, buying Topps, Goldin Auctions, and Steiner Sports and locking up exclusive card licenses for MLB, the NBA, and the NFL. Every "Fanatics ___" brand you run into in the hobby — Card, Collect, Live, Authentic, Grading — is a division of this one company.

Before it ever touched a trading card, Fanatics was an e-commerce operation built around licensed team apparel. Michael Rubin built the company into the dominant seller of official jerseys, hats, and gear by running the online storefronts for the major pro leagues and hundreds of college and pro team sites under one back-end operation — the same reason a hat bought on NFLShop.com, MLBShop.com, or a team's own "Shop" link often ships from Fanatics regardless of which site placed the order. That licensed-merchandise business is still Fanatics's largest revenue source; collectibles is a newer, separate expansion on top of it.

Fanatics moved into cards deliberately and fast. In 2021 it launched Fanatics Trading Cards after signing long-term exclusive licensing deals with MLB and the MLBPA, the NBA and NBPA, and the NFLPA — agreements that would only take effect once each league's existing manufacturer contract expired. Signing those licenses meant Fanatics needed a company that could actually print and distribute cards, so on January 4, 2022 it paid roughly $500 million for Topps's trading-card and entertainment division. That single deal gave Fanatics a 70-year manufacturing pedigree, a production pipeline, and the brand equity of the Topps name in one move — see What Is Topps? for that side of the deal, and What Is Panini? for the manufacturer whose NBA and NFL licenses Fanatics eventually took over as well.

• Fanatics (cards) — the trading-card manufacturing business, mostly still branded Topps, that holds exclusive MLB, NBA, and NFL licenses.
• Fanatics Collect — the auction and fixed-price marketplace built from Goldin Auctions after Fanatics acquired it.
• Fanatics Live — the livestream app for card breaks and real-time selling, Fanatics's answer to Whatnot.
• Fanatics Authentic — the memorabilia authentication and autograph-signing division that absorbed Steiner Sports in 2019.
• Fanatics Grading — on-site card grading built into the Fanatics Collect platform and powered by CGC.

Each of those runs as its own product with its own workflow, but all five sit under the same parent company and increasingly cross-promote each other — a card graded through Fanatics Grading can move straight into a Fanatics Collect auction, for example, without leaving the ecosystem.

• Privately held.Fanatics is not publicly traded; it has raised money from outside investors across several funding rounds, including a 2022 round that reportedly valued the company at around $31 billion, but it doesn't trade on a public stock exchange.
• Michael Rubin, founder and CEO. Rubin built Fanatics into the dominant licensed-merchandise e-commerce operator before leading its expansion into cards, collectibles, and, more recently, sports betting under a separate Fanatics Betting and Gaming unit.
• Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. Fanatics runs its e-commerce and collectibles operations out of Jacksonville, with warehouses, offices, and authentication facilities spread across multiple states.
• Antitrust scrutiny.Consolidating MLB, NBA, and NFL card licenses under one company drew a 2023 antitrust lawsuit from Panini, which is still working through the courts — see What Is Panini? for that side of the fight.

Confirm the exact card with Identify & Research — free-path first (on-device OCR, catalog match, and fingerprints). For the trading-card licensing timeline in detail — which sport went exclusive to Fanatics and when — see What Is a Fanatics Card?. For the manufacturer Fanatics bought to get into the card business, see What Is Topps?, and for the manufacturer Fanatics took the NBA and NFL licenses from, see What Is Panini?. For Fanatics's auction and marketplace platform, see What Is Fanatics Collect?, or open the full guides library.