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Fanatics sells licensed sports merchandise, trading cards, and collectibles, and runs sports betting and e-commerce operations.
Fanatics is a sports merchandise and collectibles giant. It sells the jerseys, hats, T-shirts, and bobbleheads that fans buy to show off their team loyalty, and it makes most of its money by licensing the rights to sell officially branded gear from leagues and teams like the NFL, NBA, MLB, and hundreds of colleges. If you have bought a team jersey from an official online store, there is a good chance Fanatics handled the sale, the warehousing, and the shipping behind the scenes.
The company is not just a T-shirt shop anymore. It has spent the last several years grabbing pieces of the sports world that sit close to the fan: trading cards through its Fanatics Collectibles arm, sports betting and iGaming through Fanatics Betting and Gaming, and even event experiences. The trading card business is a big deal. Fanatics bought Topps, the iconic baseball card brand, after a messy fight, and it locked up long-term exclusive card rights with the major leagues. That turned a company known for hoodies into a major player in a market where a single rare card can sell for millions. Why do leagues and teams let Fanatics do this? Because merchandise is a hassle. Designing, manufacturing, stocking, and shipping thousands of items for every team is complicated, and Fanatics does it at scale, often through long-term deals that make it the exclusive provider. That exclusivity is both its strength and its vulnerability. It gives Fanatics a moat, but it also means regulators and rivals watch closely. The company has faced lawsuits and complaints over everything from merchandise quality to how it handles trading card releases, and its aggressive deal-making has drawn scrutiny from the U.S. government over competition concerns.
Fanatics was founded by Michael Rubin, who built it from a small online seller of sports gear into a private company worth tens of billions of dollars on paper, backed by investors and sports leagues themselves. It is headquartered in Florida, and it has been expanding fast into new businesses while leaning on its core merchandise machine for cash. The bet is simple: fans will spend money on their teams whether that means a jersey, a pack of cards, or a wager on Sunday's game, and Fanatics wants to be the company standing in the middle of all of it.
Saved answer · last researched 4 Nov 2026