The Jersey That Arrived Before the News Cycle Ended
On the evening of July 1, 2018, somewhere in a warehouse complex outside Louisville, Kentucky, heat presses stood loaded with blank Lakers jerseys. Blank Sixers jerseys, too. The blanks had been staged for days — cut, sewn, and waiting — because somewhere in Cleveland, LeBron James was about to decide where he'd play basketball next season, and the only thing Michael Rubin's company needed to know was which name and which number to print. When James announced his four-year, $154 million deal with Los Angeles, Fanatics had finished jerseys for sale on its own website and on NBA.com within hours. They flew off the digital shelves in quantities the company has never publicly disclosed but that its executives have described, in that careful way privately held companies describe things, as unprecedented.
This scene — blanks staged, presses warm, the apparatus of commerce coiled around a single unpredictable human decision — captures something essential about what Fanatics has become and what it is still becoming. The company that executed that LeBron play was a $2.3 billion e-commerce retailer with exclusive manufacturing rights for an expanding roster of professional leagues. The company sitting here in mid-2025, claiming roughly $8.1 billion in 2024 revenue and projecting $13 billion for 2026, is something else entirely: a vertically integrated platform that manufactures jerseys, prints trading cards, takes sports bets, vaults collectibles, runs a marketplace, hosts a 125,000-person fan festival, and has just announced a content studio with projects spanning Tom Brady flag football specials and the official Olympic film for LA28. It employs 22,000 people across 80 offices globally. It has raised approximately $4.9 billion in equity financing. Its most recent private valuation, from a December 2022 round, was $31 billion, though secondary market transactions have since marked it closer to $25 billion — a gap that tells its own story about the distance between ambition and execution.
The paradox at the center of Fanatics is that it has built the most formidable moat in sports commerce — a thicket of exclusive, long-term licensing relationships with every major North American league, most of their players' associations, and an expanding roster of global sports properties — and then used that moat's cash flow to fund a series of expensive bets in adjacent categories where the moat doesn't yet exist. The jersey business subsidizes the card business which subsidizes the sportsbook which may, someday, subsidize something else. It is an organism that grows by occupying sequential niches in the sports consumption lifecycle. Whether that organism is building a flywheel or a house of cards depends on a question nobody can yet answer: Can a single company own the entire emotional arc of being a sports fan?
By the Numbers
The Fanatics Empire, Mid-2025
$8.1B2024 revenue (up 15% YoY)
~$13BProjected 2026 revenue
$31BLast primary valuation (Dec. 2022)
22,000+Employees worldwide
100M+Fan database
$4.9BTotal equity raised
80Global offices
~$400MTotal debt (end of 2024)
The Kid Who Couldn't Read But Could Count
Michael Rubin grew up in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania, a suburb that provided an unremarkable setting for a remarkably restless child. He had difficulty reading — a fact he mentions openly and often — but possessed an almost feral instinct for commerce. At eight years old he was selling vegetable seeds door-to-door. By ten he'd added homemade stationery and a snow-shoveling operation. At twelve he was tuning skis in his parents' basement. At fourteen, using $2,500 in bar mitzvah money as seed capital and a lease co-signed by his father, he opened Mike's Ski and Sport in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. When a snowless winter cratered sales and left him in debt at sixteen, he settled with creditors using a loan from his father — on the condition he attend college. He enrolled at Villanova. He lasted one semester.
By his early twenties, Rubin had built a chain of five ski shops and was already thinking about the internet's capacity to connect surplus inventory with distant demand. In 1995 he founded Global Sports Inc., which would become GSI Commerce — an e-commerce infrastructure company that powered online storefronts for brands like
Ralph Lauren and Dick's Sporting Goods. GSI moved $100 million in gross merchandise volume by 1999. By 2002 it was running NASCAR's first online store. Within four years it had signed e-commerce deals with MLB, NHL, NFL, and the NBA, becoming the first online retailer partnered with all four major North American leagues. In 2011, eBay acquired GSI Commerce for $2.4 billion. Rubin kept one piece: the licensed sports merchandise division, which he had acquired earlier that year for $277 million.
That division was Fanatics.
If you're selling the same merchandise as what's available on Alibaba or Amazon, you should quit and go home.
What Rubin understood, probably before anyone else in e-commerce, was that sports merchandise isn't a commodity. It is an emotional product sold in micro-moments — the three hours after a trade, the ninety minutes after a championship, the instant a rookie becomes a star. The window of peak demand is brutally short, and the traditional licensed apparel supply chain, with its six-to-nine-month lead times and massive pre-season inventory bets, was structurally incapable of exploiting it. Rubin saw that the company that could collapse the time between a fan's emotional impulse and the arrival of a jersey at their door would own the category. Not compete in it. Own it.
The Architecture of Inevitability
The original Fanatics — Football Fanatics — was founded in 1995 by Alan and Mitchell Trager as a brick-and-mortar sports merchandise shop at the Orange Park Mall outside Jacksonville, Florida. The Tragers built it into a respectable e-commerce operation running over 250 websites and generating $186.3 million in net revenue by 2010, with $23.8 million in non-GAAP operating income. When Rubin's GSI Commerce acquired it in February 2011 for $277 million — $171 million in cash and $106 million in GSI stock — the Tragers stayed on. The deal was strategic: GSI's licensed sports merchandise business had done approximately $300 million in revenue in 2010, and the combination would create a leader in what was then estimated as a $15 billion market.
But Rubin's ambition wasn't to be a leader. It was to be the only player that mattered.
After the eBay sale, Rubin restructured his retained assets under Kynetic, an internet holding company that also housed flash-sales site Rue La La and ShopRunner. Fanatics was the star child. By 2012, the company had raised $150 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Venture Partners at a $1.5 billion valuation. By 2013, another $170 million brought in Temasek Holdings and Alibaba Group at a $3.1 billion valuation. The capital wasn't for marketing. It was for building infrastructure — warehouses near stadiums, on-demand manufacturing capability, heat-press technology that could personalize a jersey in minutes rather than weeks — and, critically, for funding the escalating bids required to lock up exclusive relationships with the leagues.
Fanatics' private fundraising trajectory
2011GSI Commerce acquires Fanatics for $277M; eBay acquires GSI for $2.4B; Rubin retains Fanatics.
2012$150M raise at $1.5B valuation (Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Venture Partners).
2013$170M raise at $3.1B valuation (Temasek, Alibaba).
2017$1B+ round led by SoftBank Vision Fund at $4.5B valuation; NFL and MLB invest directly.
2020Series E at $6.2B valuation.
2021 (Mar)Series F; valuation reaches $12.8B.
2021 (Aug)Series G: $325M raise at $18B valuation (Silver Lake, Insight, SoftBank,
Jay-Z's Roc Nation).
The sequence is striking for two reasons. First, the acceleration: a roughly 20x valuation increase in a decade, from $1.5 billion in 2012 to $31 billion in late 2022, fueled by approximately $4.9 billion in total equity raised. Second, the identity of the investors: not just traditional venture and growth equity firms but the leagues and players' associations themselves — the very entities that control the licenses on which the entire business depends. By the time of the March 2022 raise, leagues, players' associations, and team owners collectively owned approximately 10% of Fanatics. The NFL contributed $320 million in a single check. This was not merely an investment. It was structural alignment — the leagues had made themselves shareholders in the success of their own licensing partner, creating an incentive architecture that made switching costs astronomical and alternative licensees nearly unthinkable.
Vertical Commerce and the Micro-Moment Machine
The strategic insight that separated Fanatics from every other sports retailer was deceptively simple: control the means of production, not just the means of distribution. In 2016, the company began dabbling in manufacturing, securing limited permissions from leagues to produce apparel in response to what it called "micro-moments" — sudden surges in demand triggered by on-field events. A player hits a walk-off home run. A quarterback throws a game-winning pass. A trade sends a superstar to a new city. In those moments, fan demand spikes violently and decays rapidly. The traditional supply chain — design, sample, approve, manufacture overseas, ship, warehouse, distribute — couldn't respond in less than months. Fanatics could respond in hours.
The Odell Beckham Jr. catch in 2014 was the cautionary tale that haunted the industry. When the Giants receiver made his iconic one-handed touchdown grab against the Cowboys on Sunday Night Football, it took weeks to get related merchandise into consumers' hands. By then the moment had passed. The money had evaporated.
Fanatics built its manufacturing capability around this problem. It acquired Majestic, the athletic apparel maker that manufactured on-field uniforms for MLB, from VF Corp. It positioned fulfillment centers and blank-jersey inventory in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Florida. It invested in heat-press and sublimation technology that could apply names, numbers, and graphics to pre-cut blanks in minutes. The system meant Fanatics could produce finished, personalized jerseys for any of the 2,000-plus players in the NFL, or any of the hundreds of MLB, NBA, and NHL players, on demand. No pre-season inventory gamble. No dead stock. No missed moments.
He owns this marketplace.
The leagues noticed. In May 2018, the NFL gave Fanatics a 10-year exclusive deal to manufacture and sell all Nike-branded NFL fan merchandise starting in 2020. (Nike retained on-field gear.) The NFLPA had already made its move in early 2017, granting Fanatics the right to control who could use players' names and images on apparel and merchandise — effectively making Fanatics the gatekeeper for every company, including Nike, that wanted to sell player-identified NFL products. If Nike wanted to sell a player t-shirt, it would need a sub-license from Fanatics.
This was the architecture of inevitability. By controlling both the manufacturing and the licensing gateway, Fanatics had made itself indispensable to the leagues and functionally irreplaceable by competitors. The data reinforced the lock: Fanatics' platform served as the official e-commerce backend for over 900 teams, leagues, and colleges, generating a database of more than 100 million sports fans. That database — purchase histories, team affinities, player preferences, geographic and demographic profiles accumulated over a decade — was not merely a customer list. It was the raw material for every adjacent business Rubin planned to build.
The Card That Scuttled Two SPACs
In August 2021, Fanatics made the kind of move that looks, in retrospect, like the plot twist that redefines everything preceding it. Without having printed or sold a single trading card, the company secured exclusive, long-term licensing agreements with MLB, the MLBPA, the NBA, the NBPA, and the NFLPA for trading cards. Later it added the NFL itself. In a single stroke, Fanatics had locked up the rights to produce licensed cards for every player in every major North American sport.
The casualties were immediate. Topps, the 70-year-old cardmaking giant synonymous with baseball cards since 1951, had been preparing to go public via a SPAC at a proposed $1.6 billion valuation. The deal collapsed overnight when Topps lost its MLB and MLBPA rights. Panini, the Italian company that held NBA, NBPA, NFL, and NFLPA card licenses, saw its own SPAC discussions similarly derailed.
Five months later, in January 2022, Fanatics bought Topps' sports and entertainment division for roughly $500 million — less than a third of the valuation Topps had been seeking in its SPAC. It was the kind of acquisition that would have been impossible without the licensing coup: by stripping Topps of its most valuable relationships, Fanatics cratered the asset's price and then bought the carcass for its infrastructure, brand equity, and 350 global employees. Michael Eisner, whose Tornante Company had owned Topps, called it "a jewel in the Fanatics portfolio" with a graciousness that may or may not have been genuine.
The collectibles market was vast — Verified Market Research estimated the broader sports collectibles universe at $44 billion — and the pandemic had supercharged interest. A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card had sold for $12.6 million, the most ever for any trading card. Beneath that ultra-premium stratum, ordinary collectors were fueling a boom, with more than 1,000 card shows planned across the country annually. Fanatics saw an industry that had been, in Matthew Primack's words, "quite old-fashioned" — dominated by a small number of brands operating with mid-twentieth-century distribution models — and ripe for the same vertical-integration playbook that had conquered merchandise.
The company moved fast. It acquired PWCC, the second-largest online marketplace for cards, later rebranding it as Fanatics Collect. It bought GC Packaging, a leading card printer, to control manufacturing quality. It expanded Topps' direct-to-hobby-shop distribution from 180 shops to nearly 700. It launched Fanatics Live for content-based live "breaking" — the practice of opening sealed card boxes on camera, a format that had exploded on platforms like YouTube and Whatnot. It struck an exclusive global trading card partnership with Shohei Ohtani. It partnered with Sotheby's for high-end card auctions. It created MLB Debut Patches — actual jersey patches worn by every debuting player, authenticated after the game, and placed directly onto rookie cards. A Paul Skenes one-of-one Topps MLB Rookie Debut Patch card sold for $1.1 million in March 2025, the highest-selling baseball card since 2010.
By 2024, Fanatics Collectibles was generating approximately $1.6 billion in revenue with over 20% EBITDA margins. It had turned profitable early — a fact CFO Glenn Schiffman highlighted as unusual for a business that was, effectively, a startup within a startup. The collectibles unit was growing at roughly 40% year over year and had become, alongside the commerce business, one of the two cash-generating engines funding Rubin's next bet.
Panini's Complaint and the Antitrust Question
Panini did not go quietly. In August 2023, the Italian company filed a 56-page federal lawsuit accusing Fanatics of monopolizing the American sports-card market through "aggressively seeking multidecade licensing deals, acquiring any potential competitors, and resorting to strong-arm tactics to undermine any rivals who resist their takeover." Panini's complaint cast Fanatics as "the East India Company of the sports collectibles world." Four days later, Fanatics fired back with a 101-page countersuit alleging unfair competition, tortious interference, and breach of good faith. Fanatics described Panini as "an antiquated foreign incumbent" hoping "to undermine its competitor through unfair tactics so that it may continue to treat its American subsidiary as an ATM serving its private owners in Italy."
The legal dispute, presided over by U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rearden in the Southern District of New York, centers on a question with implications far beyond trading cards: Is securing exclusive licensing agreements from willing counterparties — the leagues and players' associations — an act of competition or monopolization? Fanatics contends it simply offered the leagues a better deal and won. "That is a portrait of competition working," it wrote in its filings. Panini argues that the simultaneous acquisition of rights across multiple leagues, combined with acquisitions of Topps, PWCC, and GC Packaging, constitutes unlawful foreclosure.
The NFLPA accelerated the conflict in August 2023, terminating its licensing agreement with Panini effective immediately and declaring Fanatics the exclusive maker of NFLPA-branded trading cards — with just two weeks until the NFL season kickoff and multiple Panini products already in production. It was a move that potentially cost Panini millions in lost sales on the year's rookie class.
The case remains unresolved. But regardless of the legal outcome, the strategic reality is that Fanatics now controls or will soon control the licensed trading card rights for all four major North American professional sports leagues, a position of consolidation the industry has never seen.
The Sportsbook Gamble
If the collectibles play was audacious, the sports betting entry was something closer to reckless ambition — or, depending on your vantage point, the logical next node in the network.
Fanatics Betting & Gaming launched its sportsbook app in beta in May 2023. In August 2023, it acquired the operating businesses of PointsBet USA — which had approximately $130 million in revenue — to accelerate its entry. By year-end 2024, the betting and gaming division was generating approximately $300 million in revenue, with Fanatics Sportsbook live in a growing number of states. In May 2025, Fanatics launched its first mobile casino product.
The strategic logic was seductive: 100 million fans in the database, verified payment methods on file, years of purchase history revealing team affinities and spending patterns. While DraftKings and FanDuel were spending $200 to $400 to acquire each new sports bettor, Fanatics could theoretically convert existing commerce customers at near-zero marginal cost. A fan who bought a Patrick Mahomes jersey was, in Fanatics' model, a warm lead for a Mahomes-related prop bet.
The reality has been messier. By the key industry metrics tracked by independent analyst Alfonso Straffon using state regulatory filings, Fanatics held approximately 6.8% of handle market share and 5.4% of gross gaming revenue across states where its sportsbook was live — a respectable showing for a late entrant but a vast distance from the FanDuel-DraftKings duopoly, which together commanded roughly 72% of dollars wagered nationally. The market share data also revealed volatility that undercut the growth narrative: in New Jersey, Fanatics' share spiked to an eye-popping 31.6% in April 2024, then collapsed to 2.3% in May, a swing widely attributed to the migration of a single VIP bettor — "the biggest losing player in the regulated market by a mile," per industry research firm Eilers & Krejcik — who apparently toggled between Fanatics and DraftKings depending on promotional offers.
That one bettor could swing state-level market share by nearly 30 percentage points revealed something important about the early-stage sportsbook: its organic customer base was still thin enough that whale activity could dominate the topline. By August 2025, Fanatics surged again to 14.3% national handle share — possibly inflated by promotional spending ahead of football season — before settling back to 7.7% by November 2025.
The betting business was the primary drag on consolidated profitability. Fitch Ratings, in an October 2024 report, cited Fanatics' "heavy investments in its gaming subsidiary" as a factor in leverage concerns and assigned the company's debt a B+ rating — four notches below investment grade. Moody's similarly downgraded Fanatics Commerce's rating by one notch to B1, citing "a higher reliance on its revolving credit facility and the challenges it faces to demonstrate that it can achieve the appropriate level of returns on investment." Schiffman was dismissive: "Debt is a non-story. We could pay off our debt tonight, if we wanted to, with a stroke of the pen." The company ended 2024 with approximately $400 million in total debt against $1 billion in cash and $1.5 billion in additional available credit.
Rubin projects that betting will reach 40% of the company's earnings within five years. That number — if achieved — would represent one of the most dramatic business-model transformations in modern sports commerce.
I think one of my strengths is being able to size up what's a big and interesting business. Two, can we do something to make it better? And then also, is it a good business to be in?
The NFT Fumble and the Art of the Pivot
Not everything worked. In the frothy days of 2021, when digital collectibles seemed like the future of everything, Fanatics launched Candy Digital, an NFT platform of which it was the majority owner. The timing seemed perfect — the company had just secured league trading-card rights, and NFTs appeared to be a natural digital extension.
It flopped. Rubin is unusually candid about this. "I knew it wasn't going to work," he told Boardroom in 2025. "We gave our investors the money back basically and said, this isn't going to work." The decision to unwind an entire vertical — to return capital rather than throw good money after bad — reveals something about the operating philosophy. Rubin's question is always the same: Is this a good business to be in? When the answer changes, he doesn't agonize. He kills it.
"How am I going to be better? What are we going to do? How are we going to be stronger? If you don't have that mentality, you'll become irrelevant."
The speed of the NFT retreat also served a strategic purpose: it preserved credibility with the league partners and institutional investors who were watching to see whether Fanatics' aggressive expansion was disciplined or merely profligate. Returning capital is a powerful signal.
The Uniform Debacle
Fanatics' most public embarrassment had nothing to do with digital ambition and everything to do with its original competency: making things. In March 2023, the company announced a new, expanded partnership with the NHL to become the league's authentic outfitter of on-ice player uniforms in a 10-year deal beginning in 2024. It already manufactured MLB game uniforms according to Nike specifications.
The MLB uniforms became, arguably, the story of 2024 spring training. The patching looked amateurish. The pants lacked opacity. Letter and number spacing was awkward. Social media erupted with images of what appeared to be counterfeit-quality craftsmanship on the jerseys of a $10 billion league. One Slate writer suggested Fanatics' CEO should be "called into a committee room and grilled like an executive from Big Tobacco." Another described the company's customer service account on X "furiously" trying to manage viral complaints.
The quality issue exposed a tension inherent in Fanatics' model: the same on-demand, rapid-response manufacturing system that enabled micro-moment jersey sales was not necessarily optimized for the exacting specifications of professional game-day uniforms.
Speed and customization, the company's superpowers, were different muscles than the precision required for on-field apparel worn under HD cameras and subject to the scrutiny of athletes, fans, and social media.
Fanatics maintained it had manufactured to Nike's design specifications. Whether the problems were design failures or execution failures was debatable. What wasn't debatable was the reputational cost — and the question it raised about whether a company growing this fast, in this many directions, could maintain quality across all of them simultaneously.
The Fest, the Studio, and the Infinite Fan
In October 2023, Fanatics launched Fanatics Events, a subsidiary designed to reinvent the live-event landscape for sports fans. The inaugural Fanatics Fest NYC, held in August 2024 at the Javits Center, was a three-day extravaganza that brought together athletes like LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Kevin Durant with musicians, influencers, and tens of thousands of paying fans. The second iteration, in June 2025, drew more than 125,000 attendees and debuted the Fanatics Games — a competition pitting athletes, celebrities, and creators against fans for over $2 million in prizes.
Rubin is explicit that Fanatics Fest is not meant to make money directly. It is a marketing activation — a physical manifestation of the platform that lets fans buy merchandise, collect cards, place bets, attend events, and interact with athletes, all under a single brand umbrella. In a world where consumer attention is fragmented across infinite digital channels, creating a physical gathering point for the most passionate sports fans has strategic value that transcends the economics of ticket sales.
In January 2026, Fanatics extended this logic further, announcing Fanatics Studios — a joint venture with OBB Media to create, finance, produce, and distribute sports entertainment content. The slate was staggering in its ambition: the official Olympic film for LA28; a Tom Brady flag football documentary; production of the 2026 ESPY Awards with ESPN; hours of committed programming across ESPN; partnerships with WWE, Fox Sports, and MLB. The company also launched Fanatics Advertising, led by Jeremi Gorman (former head of ad sales at Netflix and Snap), with ad networks designed to connect marketers with sports fans across digital and CTV platforms.
Each new vertical extended the same thesis: the company's 100 million fan database is an asset whose value compounds with each additional surface area. A jersey purchase leads to a card recommendation. A card collection signals betting propensity. A sportsbook account generates viewing data that informs advertising. Event attendance deepens brand loyalty. Content creates new discovery pathways. The fan doesn't need to use every product. They just need to exist within the ecosystem long enough for cross-pollination to occur.
The CFO's Ledger and the Question of Profitability
Glenn Schiffman arrived at Fanatics with a résumé that read like a preparation course for exactly this job. Twenty-five years as an investment banker — Lehman Brothers, Nomura, Guggenheim Securities, The Raine Group — followed by a stint as CFO at IAC/InteractiveCorp, Barry Diller's holding company, where he helped build over $44 billion in shareholder value. At Fanatics, Schiffman oversees a financial architecture unusual for a company of this scale: a private entity with the complexity of a public conglomerate, running three distinct business units at three different stages of maturity.
In early 2025, Schiffman provided Sportico with the company's first detailed public discussion of its financials. The numbers told a story of deliberate cross-subsidy. Fanatics Commerce — the core apparel and merchandise business — accounted for approximately $6.2 billion, or 77% of total 2024 revenue. Fanatics Collectibles brought in approximately $1.6 billion. Fanatics Betting & Gaming contributed approximately $300 million. Commerce and Collectibles were both profitable and generating free cash flow. That cash flow was being reinvested into the sportsbook, the new Fanatics Collect marketplace, the events business, and other growth initiatives.
Schiffman projected the overall business would reach EBITDA profitability in 2025 — a milestone that, if achieved, would be unusual for an entity simultaneously scaling three capital-intensive verticals. The company's balance sheet supported the assertion of financial health: $1 billion in cash against roughly $400 million in total debt, with $1.5 billion in additional credit capacity, including an untapped $600 million revolver. Commerce had recently paid down $50 million in debt, bringing its outstanding balance to approximately $150 million.
The question investors and analysts circle is not whether the company can survive — with $1 billion in cash and profitable core businesses, it clearly can — but whether the returns on the invested capital in betting and gaming will justify the dilution, the ratings pressure, and the organizational complexity of running what amounts to three separate companies under one roof.
I think Fanatics, in five years from now, could be a $30 billion, $50 billion business in revenues, and could be the most valuable company in sports.
The Man and the Machine
The question of whether Fanatics is a company or a personality is one its investors, employees, and league partners must privately wrestle with. Rubin's network is the company's network. His friendships with athletes — Tom Brady, LeBron James, Jay-Z, Drake, Meek Mill — are Fanatics' marketing pipeline. His relationships with commissioners — Adam Silver, Roger Goodell, Rob Manfred — are the lubricant for licensing negotiations. His 1.1 million Instagram followers serve as a consumer-facing brand channel. When he appears on Shark Tank, it is Fanatics that benefits.
He sold his minority stake in the Philadelphia 76ers in June 2022 specifically to eliminate any conflict of interest as Fanatics expanded deeper into the league ecosystem. "I'm 100% locked into making Fanatics the most incredible digital sports platform in the world," he told an MIT Sloan conference. He has said he will run the company until he dies.
This is a strength and a risk. Rubin's pattern recognition — his ability to identify an attractive business, determine whether he can make it better, and move decisively — is the animating intelligence behind every Fanatics expansion. He spotted the micro-moment opportunity before anyone else. He recognized that league equity partnerships would create structural lock-in. He saw the collectibles market as an old-fashioned industry ripe for disruption. He had the discipline to kill the NFT business when it wasn't working.
But the company has no public succession plan, no clear second-in-command who could replicate the CEO's unique combination of deal-making instinct, celebrity relationships, and operator intensity. Vice Chairman Doug Mack, CEO of Fanatics Commerce, has been announced as retiring at year's end. The executive bench is deep — CFO Schiffman, Betting & Gaming CEO Matt King, Chief Strategy Officer Tucker Kain — but none carry Rubin's personal relationships with the league principals.
Asked about going public at the January 2025 NRF conference, Rubin was characteristically direct: "We're in a great position. We have a really good balance sheet, no liquidity needs, zero-zero pressure. Going public is not in the cards right now." For a company that has raised $4.9 billion from investors including SoftBank, Fidelity, BlackRock, Silver Lake, and Clearlake Capital, the indefinite deferral of a public offering is a feature, not a bug. Privacy lets Rubin run the sprint — investing aggressively, tolerating short-term losses in betting, staging expensive events that don't need to justify themselves on quarterly earnings calls.
It also means scrutiny is limited. Private companies can conceal revenue struggles, as one skeptical executive noted to CNBC. "They can get away with a hell of a lot more because they have to anticipate the contribution of each business line to the revenue and EBITDA and how it will change for the future. And the leagues are also partners, so it's in their best interest to elevate the value."
The $40 Million Weekend in Tokyo
In March 2025, MLB opened its season with a two-game Tokyo Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs. For Fanatics, it was the biggest-selling event in company history: $40 million in fan gear and trading card sales across multiple retail channels, online and in-person, in Japan and the United States. A limited-edition collection from Japanese artist Takashi Murakami sold out on the Fanatics app in under an hour — most items within 15 minutes. More than 12,000 Topps Series 1 Japan Exclusive Mega Boxes sold out online. At the Tokyo Dome, 140 registers were needed to handle foot traffic, with 2,000 fans waiting in line before the first game.
The Tokyo Series crystallized the Fanatics model in miniature. The supply chain — jerseys, cards, memorabilia, exclusive artist collaborations — was staged and ready. The data infrastructure identified demand in real time. The manufacturing flexibility allowed rapid response. The licensing relationships ensured exclusivity. The star power — Shohei Ohtani, coming off the first 50-homer, 50-steal season in major league history and an exclusive Topps partnership — provided the emotional catalyst that no amount of operational excellence can manufacture on its own.
A Caitlin Clark rookie card sold for $660,000 in July 2025, nearly doubling the record for a women's card. Paul Skenes' $1.1 million patch card set a 15-year baseball card record. The commerce engine and the collectibles engine were feeding each other, each transaction generating data that informed the next product, the next partnership, the next moment of fan engagement.
Somewhere in Tokyo, 2,000 fans stood in line, waiting to buy something that wouldn't exist without a licensing agreement, a manufacturing facility, a data platform, a distribution network, a celebrity partnership, and the irrational love of a game. The line itself was the product.
