Fanatics: Is Your Hobby Being Held Hostage by Corporate Greed?

Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin walked into a meeting with a competitor’s CEO and told him, to his face, that Fanatics could turn off the machines that made his company’s products whenever it felt like it — and then actually did it.

The Non-Financial Ledger

A Century of Culture, Handed to One Company

Trading cards are a piece of American childhood. For more than 100 years, cracking open a pack of cards has been a ritual — something you did with your dad, with your kids, with your friends at the kitchen table. The lawsuit filed against Fanatics acknowledges this directly: “Professional sports trading cards have been a fixture in American culture for more than a century, growing into a multibillion-dollar industry.” This is a hobby with history, with community, with meaning that goes beyond the cardboard itself.

The trading card market in its healthiest years functioned on competition. During the 1980s and 1990s, multiple companies — Topps, Upper Deck, Fleer, Donruss — raced to out-innovate each other. Holographic images, jersey swatches, hand-signed autographs: all of it came from a marketplace where companies had to earn your attention and your money. For decades, license deals ran three to five years maximum, ensuring companies competed regularly and kept quality high. That competitive ecosystem, built over generations, is exactly what Fanatics targeted and systematically dismantled.

The Threat That Ruined Careers Before They Started

The most human cost in this entire story belongs to the workers and the athletes who got caught in Fanatics’ crossfire. Thirty-six Panini employees were poached in what the lawsuit calls a calculated “raid,” not because Fanatics needed them yet, but because taking them would cripple Panini’s ability to function. These were designers, marketers, and production specialists — people with specialized skills who had built careers and reputations in a niche industry. Fanatics told them directly: quit Panini now, or you will never work in this industry again after our licenses take effect. That is coercion dressed up as a job offer.

Rookie athletes — young players at the very start of their professional careers — were targeted with the same weapon. Fanatics paid them to sign exclusive autograph deals, knowing it could not yet use those autographs on its own cards. The point of the payment was not to create a product. The point was to ensure Panini could never create one. A star rookie’s first licensed autograph card — the kind of card that collectors treasure, that families frame, that kids trade at lunch — was intentionally erased from existence so that a corporation could tighten its grip on a market it had not yet fully seized. The human moment was sacrificed for the monopoly play.

Small Businesses Squeezed Until They Broke

Local card shops — the kind of small business that anchors a strip mall, where the owner knows every regular customer by name — received contracts from Fanatics dictating minimum prices they had to charge or lose their supply entirely. The lawsuit is precise about the language: Fanatics called these price floors “suggestions,” but the contracts made clear that non-compliance meant account suspension or termination. These shop owners had no leverage. Fanatics controlled the supply of every licensed NFL, NBA, and MLB card on the market. Comply, or close.

The case breakers — a community of streamers and collectors who built small businesses and fanbases around opening packs live online — faced an ultimatum as well. Fanatics told them to abandon every platform they had built their audiences on and move exclusively to Fanatics Live, under terms the lawsuit describes as “so one-sided that they would likely drive many case breakers out of business altogether.” This is a community of content creators, many of them younger people who turned a passion into an income stream, being told by a monopolist to hand over their business model or starve. The hobby’s most engaged and accessible layer — the live-break community that brought trading cards to a new generation on Twitch and YouTube — was specifically targeted for absorption or destruction.

Legal Receipts

The Most Damning Quotes From The Complaint

“After acquiring this control, Fanatics’ CEO, Michael Rubin, told Panini’s CEO, Mark Warsop, that Fanatics could now turn off the GCP machines devoted to Panini whenever it wanted, and from time-to-time Fanatics did stop producing trading cards for Panini.” Complaint ¶87 — Direct allegation regarding Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin’s threat to Panini’s CEO

“Fanatics threatened to blacklist Panini employees from ever working in the industry again when Fanatics’ exclusive long-term licenses took effect unless they immediately quit Panini and joined Fanatics. The fact that this employee raiding occurred years prior to Fanatics license agreements taking effect suggests that the purpose was to harm its only remaining competitor rather than to meet any legitimate near-term business needs.” Complaint ¶13 — On Fanatics’ workforce coercion strategy

“In or around April 2023, Michael Rubin, Mike Mahan, Omar Wilkes, and other Fanatics employees told some of the biggest and most influential sports agencies representing current and prospective NFL and NBA players, including CAA Sports and WME Sports (William Morris Endeavor), that Panini would be unable to fulfill its contractual obligations to athletes, that Panini was going bankrupt, and that Panini would lose its licenses with the NFL, NFL Players Association, NBA, and NBA Players Association by June 2023.” Complaint ¶110 — On Fanatics’ deliberate false statements to player agencies

“Fanatics did not acquire this monopoly through superior products, business acumen, or historical accident, but rather through its anticompetitive conduct alleged herein. There are no procompetitive justifications to offset the anticompetitive harm caused by Fanatics unlawful conduct.” Complaint ¶216 — Monopolization count, direct statement on how the monopoly was built

“The collective equity stake of the Leagues and players associations (plus NHL and MLS) is worth approximately $5 to $10 billion. In this way, Fanatics and each of the leagues and each of their player associations agreed to split the monopoly profits caused by the anticompetitive agreements.” Complaint ¶70 — On the equity arrangements used to buy the participation of sports leagues and unions

“Fanatics has successfully foreclosed one hundred percent of the market for Major U.S. Professional Sports Leagues trading cards for the next decade at least. Rivals have been sidelined due to these exclusive agreements and consumers will suffer.” Complaint ¶69 — Summary of market foreclosure

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality: The Monopoly Tax on Your Hobby

The price impact is already measurable and documented. According to the lawsuit, Topps card prices rose 50% in the years since Fanatics launched its anticompetitive campaign, while comparable Panini cards held flat or declined. That 50% markup is a direct tax on collectors, investors, parents, and kids who just want to buy a pack of cards. In a market that did $5 billion (enough to fund free school lunches for every food-insecure child in America for over a year) in sales in 2024 and is projected to nearly triple by 2031, a 50% artificial price increase represents billions of dollars extracted from everyday people and funneled upward into a monopoly.

The mechanisms of extraction are layered and deliberate. Fanatics imposed minimum price floors on local card shops, meaning the shop owner cannot compete on price even if they want to. Fanatics forced distributors to accept higher margins for Fanatics products or lose supply access entirely. Fanatics pressured big-box retailers to carry only Fanatics-controlled card lines, eliminating shelf space for any alternatives. Every single node in the supply chain — from the factory to the small shop to the big box store to the consumer’s wallet — was pressured, coerced, or reengineered to funnel more money to Fanatics.

The lawsuit notes that Topps was purchased for $500 million (roughly what 8,300 average American workers earn in an entire year combined), which was only about one-third of Topps’ valuation before Fanatics began its monopoly play. Fanatics was able to buy the market leader at a fire-sale price because its own anticompetitive actions had already spooked Topps’ owners and depressed its value. That is a company weaponizing its own misconduct to drive down the acquisition cost of its victims. And the leagues and players associations — the organizations supposedly representing players and fans — took equity stakes worth between $5 billion and $10 billion ($5 billion is more than the annual GDP of some small nations) in exchange for locking every competitor out of the market for a generation.

Economic Inequality: The End of Small Business in the Hobby Space

Independent local card shops are a genuine small-business community, and the complaint is specific about the tools Fanatics used to bring them to heel. Contracts with unilateral minimum pricing clauses. Threats to cut off supply if shops sold cards on independent B2B trading platforms. Forced migration of case-breakers onto Fanatics’ own streaming platform under terms designed to eliminate them. Each of these measures individually might look like aggressive-but-legal business tactics. Taken together as a coordinated scheme, they describe a corporation systematically stripping independent business owners of any autonomy, any pricing power, and any alternative market access.

The case-breaker community deserves particular attention. These are people — many of them younger and working-class — who built genuine small media businesses around a shared passion. They invested in streaming equipment, built audiences, cultivated communities. Fanatics looked at those self-built ecosystems and decided they were a market to be captured. The “Fanatics Live” ultimatum gave case-breakers a simple choice: hand your business to us, or watch us starve you out of the supply chain. The lawsuit describes the terms of Fanatics Live as likely to “drive many case breakers out of business altogether.” These are not hedge funds being squeezed out. These are hobbyists who turned a passion into a paycheck, now facing corporate annihilation.