What Is Panini?

Panini is a trading-card and sticker company founded in 1961 in Modena, Italy, by brothers Giuseppe and Benito Panini (Franco and Umberto joined two years later). It built its reputation on collectible sticker albums, especially soccer/World Cup stickers, long before it touched a single American sports card. That changed in March 2009, when Panini Group acquired Donruss Playoff L.P. and formed Panini America, headquartered in Irving, Texas. The Donruss deal came with an existing NFL license, and Panini quickly built on it: exclusive NBA rights starting with the 2009-10 season, then exclusive NFL/NFLPA rights starting in 2016. For most of the 2010s and early 2020s, Panini was the only company legally allowed to print NBA and NFL cards. Fanatics ended that run, taking over the NBA license in October 2025 and the NFL license in 2026.

Panini's origin story starts with a newspaper distribution office, not a card factory. In 1960, Giuseppe and Benito Panini bought a batch of unsold figurine stickers from a Milan company and resold them in cheap packets around Modena — selling millions of packets almost immediately. Giuseppe formally founded Panini in 1961 to make and sell its own stickers, and the company's sticker-and-album format (fill the album, trade the duplicates) became a European institution, most famously through soccer World Cup and league sticker collections.

Panini didn't enter the U.S. sports card business until March 2009, when it acquired Donruss Playoff L.P. and folded it into a new subsidiary, Panini America. That deal is the reason Panini still prints cards under the Donruss and Score names today — both brands, along with Playoff, transferred to Panini as part of the acquisition, and Donruss Playoff's existing NFL license gave Panini its first foothold in American football cards.

• NBA — exclusive since the 2009-10 season. Panini took over as the league's sole trading-card licensee the same year it entered the U.S. market, and renewed that arrangement multiple times over the following fifteen years.
• NFL/NFLPA — exclusive since 2016. Other manufacturers held NFL rights alongside Panini for several years after the Donruss deal; Panini became the sole licensee in 2016 once those other deals ended.
• Other properties. Panini also built out licensed and unlicensed lines across soccer, UFC, and college sports over the same stretch, alongside its long-running international sticker business.

That gave Panini a run of roughly fifteen years as the only company legally allowed to put NBA or NFL team logos and player likenesses on a trading card — the reason product lines like Prizm, Select, and Mosaic became so central to modern basketball and football collecting.

Fanatics spent the early 2020s locking up exclusive licenses across major U.S. sports — MLB first, then moving on NBA and NFL rights that had belonged to Panini. Panini sued Fanatics in August 2023, alleging Fanatics used its growing licensing leverage to create a monopoly in the trading-card industry; Fanatics countersued, accusing Panini of deceptive conduct and misuse of trade secrets. In March 2025, a federal judge in New York allowed the core antitrust claims in Panini's suit to move forward, and the litigation was still unresolved as of this writing.

Regardless of how that case ends, the licenses themselves already changed hands: Panini's NBA license expired and moved to Fanatics in October 2025, and its NFL/NFLPA license expired in early 2026, with Fanatics (through Topps) launching fully licensed NFL cards that spring. Fanatics also signed a 20-year NFLPA deal covering player rights going forward. Without those licenses, Panini has said it may sell off remaining licensed inventory, lean on NFLPA-only group-licensing rights for unlicensed player (but not team-logo) cards, and shift more of its output toward college sports, soccer, and other properties it still holds.

1. Older Panini NBA and NFL cards don't change. A Prizm, Donruss, or Select card already in your collection is unaffected by who holds the license going forward — the license change only governs new print runs.
2. New NBA and NFL cardboard now comes from Fanatics. Going forward, licensed NBA and NFL cards ship under Fanatics brands, including Topps — not Panini — while Panini keeps producing soccer, college, and other non-NBA/NFL products.
3. Expect market attention on final Panini NBA/NFL releases.Last-licensed-year product from a departing manufacturer has historically drawn extra collector interest, the way it did around Topps' final licensed MLB sets before Fanatics took over baseball.

Confirm the exact card with Identify & Research — free-path first (on-device OCR, catalog match, and fingerprints). For the auction/marketplace arm of the company that took over Panini's licenses, see What Is Fanatics Collect? and What Is Topps BUNT?. For the brand Panini acquired to enter the U.S. market, see What Is a Donruss Card?, and for Panini's flagship modern product lines see What Is a Panini Prizm Card? and What Is a Panini Mosaic Card?. For the other major manufacturer that went through its own Fanatics licensing shakeup, see What Is Topps?. For the separate, unrelated company behind PSA and Card Ladder, see What Is Collectors (Collectors Holdings)?, or open the full guides library.