Fanatics sports merchandise (t-shirts, etc) is probably the worst quality merchandise I’ve purchased in my life. It’s a good thing they have such a monopoly, because after a few purchases, people would seek out alternatives. I, despite being a pretty avid sports fan, have just stopped buying sports merchandise because it’s almost always Fanatics.
100% this! The quality at Fanatics has fallen off a cliff the last few years to the point that I won’t ever order anything from there again. They have descriptions of some “performance t-shirt” material that turns out to the be low quality cotton that starts falling alert after a few washes. Advertisements of “Free Shipping” only for them to have $4 added to every order for “handling” (they’re synonymous in the US).
My tip to everyone is to order sports related clothing from Chinese sites like DHGate and AliExpress. The quality is better than Fanatics at 25% the price. “It’s counterfeit” — well sometimes a consumer has to fight back.
> The quality at Fanatics has fallen off a cliff the last few years
And yet our courts are still under the sway of the Chicago school of thought that says monopolies are _good_ for consumers, because it drives prices down and normalizes a market.
Yet.. I've never seen that come to fruition, in any circumstance, ever.
While I haven't found anything similar for professional sports, Homefield[1] is great for college gear. If your school isn't offered, they add new schools like every week. Less of a selection, I guess, but not only is the quality of Fanatics bad, their gear is also very cookie cutter. All of Homefield's apparel is unique to the school.
I feel like I have to go to the store for anything worthwhile in professional sports now, and even B&M will often just have a bunch of Fanatics junk.
Sure, I think at some historical point, and by dictionary definition, they are not.
In practical terms in north america, I've never seen them separate, and I buy online A LOT. So if they're not synonyms (and I agree with that pedantry:), they are functionally equivalent for most people's most practical purposes. They're just a phrase that goes together.
Ultimately, if a retailer advertises "FREE SHIPPING", and I find that I need to pay some additional fee beyond item's advertised price, to get the item to arrive to me, I will feel I've been deceived, whether they call that charge shipping, or handling, or gnorf.
It’s 100% the point. It’s such a common and accepted thing here that most sites just have “S & H” during the check out process. To advertise free shipping in the US implies the S&H is free. To suddenly spring a “handling” fee at the last step is deceitful and no different than airlines or hotels advertising a price and then adding a “resort fee” on the last step. And if you think differently, then why do they hide the handling fee until the very last step?
They're a doublet, like "cease and desist." Separating the two makes about as much sense as paying someone an extra fee to "handle" the goods from the warehouse to the supermarket shelf.
They even make the replica jerseys for the NHL, which has absolutely cratered the quality... and will be making the authentic jerseys too starting next year.
I'm sick of the trend of manufacturing companies being replaced by e-commerce companies who see manufacturing as an obstacle to distribution rather than a goal in itself. The quality is always worse because they don't care about the quality, only the logistics.
I don't understand how Fanatics is still in business. I've heard good things about Fanatics products literally never. I still remember the Overwatch League merch where they shipped people black jerseys with black lettering. When people complained, since it was white lettering on black material in the photo, they were told they only printed black letters and it couldn't be changed. Wild.
Rubin is good at schmoozing with big name athletes and power players in the sports world. If you can do that long enough to get some exclusivity agreements, then you're golden because no one else can make the "official" merchandise of NBA or whatever
Ebbets Field Flannels is basically the only sports merchandise I buy these days but since they were bought by Lids last year, Fanatics now has a partial stake in them too. Thankfully I haven't noticed any change in product quality, but its only a matter of time.
I was a kid in the late 1980's to early 90's. That was the height of the "Junk Wax Era." Baseball cards were so overproduced that stuff from that era is almost worthless. You can still buy sealed unopened boxes of complete sets of cards from that time.
I mention this because I don't really trust anyone's opinion about how rare something is or price guides created by groups trying to get you to buy more cards.
The hotness is whichever athletes were popular when current 24-26 years olds were children. The group that is just getting their first taste of disposable income and starts chasing the things they missed as kids.
I'm about the same age and watched cards like Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter spike about a decade ago and come crashing back down. These days its Lebron James and Ichiro Suzuki.
I probably spent about $100 total on sports cards as a kid. I never bought an individual card, just a random pack of cards every once in a while.
I had a friend with thousands of cards. His dad was a doctor and he would buy multiple boxes of Topps, Fleer, Upper Deck, and more. He would open one and categorize everything in 3 ring binders. Then he would have unopened complete sets.
He also had a hundred or more individual cards in plastic cases. I know he had a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. That one is probably still worth a lot.
It was cool to look at and that kid is a successful lawyer now but I haven't seen him in 15 years. I wonder if he still has all those card. They took up multiple book shelves in the guest room they had.
Becket (through Becket Price guide) told us what the market price was back then, only that it wasn't. We had no idea how many cards were being produced (it was A LOT) and we didn't even know that print run was an issue.
Today, card prices is all market driven (there are some bidding shenanigan's that happen though).
Today, people mostly buy graded cards, which have pop reports through the grading agency. There are also many good ways to know how many cards in a Print Run. Scotty B's cards on youtube goes over these in detail. Since there are serial numbered cards that have pack odds, you can reverse engineer the print run.
That being said, its not a wise idea to buy base cards anymore. What you really want is licensed serial numbered cards, preferably rookies with on card autos of the base card. Of course this is sport specific, such as in hockey the young guns cards are most important.
I have made about 40,000$ this year in revenue selling cards (revenue, not earnings - doesn't include cost).
My kids are into collecting pokemon cards big time. We have this conversation pretty frequently; why didn't I buy pokemon cards in the 90's? We'd be rich! I try to tell them about the over production and glut in collectible cards in the 90's but it really doesn't sink in. At the time we had just come off the beanie baby and pog fads. I personally had no interest in buying any thing. I still have no clue why these cards are "worth" as much as they say they are. On the other hand those black lotus mtg cards I used to see for $10, that is real scarcity I understand.
Yea, what the other people are missing is there were 100+ other collectable pieces of shit that ended up in the dump worth nothing. The people that managed to buy the right crap, then keep it for decades are the ones that effectively won a lottery. But really it was pure chance they happened to win.
And the ur-example is baseball cards. My dad's childhood collection was worth something like $40K in the 90s. He literally bought about 800 of them over 3-4 years in the mid-late 50s, then not only lost interest in them but in baseball completely, and the cards sat in the same clean, dry, temperature-controlled basement for 40 years until they became lottery tickets.
What everyone needs to do is to take that hobby when you bought a lot of rare, fragile stuff, and publish a high-priced coffee table book about it. Some rich bore will use that book and his money to simulate a personality, and other jealous idiots will try to imitate him, bidding up the prices.
Why does anyone say this type of thing? Someone with different interests from you isn't simulating anything. They are just being a person with interests. Honestly I disdain those who speak about such interests condescendingly much more than I would anyone who chooses to spend their money on a hobby.
Limited editions of video games seem to do decent. Many runs sell out and then buying them on amazon costs 2 to 3x the price of the limited edition originally. It is extremely rare for such an item to go much above that these days, compared to some games from the past where a new copy is 10x the price or more, but it is still enough to count as collectible.
M:TG wasn't immune to the collectibles glut in the 90s. The Fallen Empires set, which came out in 1994, was so overproduced that you can still get factory sealed booster packs for the same price as current expansions.
No, but they are from the first couple sets when production runs were smaller. WotC has made a promise to the community that they will never reprint (tournament legal versions of) some of those early cards which helps keeps them rare and expensive.
You wouldn't really want those cards reprinted anyways. They're very overpowered and seem like amateur design if you look at them through a lens of the rest of MTG design history.
You may be thinking of the different border on cards from the alpha and beta sets as variants. But that's the way every card was printed back then.
Not necessarily variants or misprints, but many old powerful cards are extremely expensive. By this point the volume is much lower just due to time, but many cards from the first ~4 sets are worth hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the card and condition.
Well consider it this way. If Fanatics produces only garbage that falls apart immediately then there may be a collectors market for it in the future since most of the existing products will have been lost to landfills. The poor quality may ironically increase future resale value, just so long as you tie steps to preserve it.
Not really. The idea of collectable cards that you can't do anything with is antiquated. Ever since Magic: The Gathering came along, kids who are interested in collecting (Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, whatever) want to do more with cards than look at them in a binder.
Pokemon cards, especially rare ones, are as big as ever, possibly bigger since a certain brand of influencers have taken an interest. As ever, you can buy them in pretty much any applicable shop in the UK. Match Attax and other football cards are still going very healthily
I don't know or know of a child who is interested in Magic: The Gathering. Their target market is more like late teens and young adults.
If you want a more accurate usurper to trading cards, you're best looking at things like Fifa Ultimate Team[1] - which, honestly, have missed a trick in not branching into physical cards - and Skylanders. Possibly also collecting skins on Fortnite and that kind of thing
[1] a sort of virtual card-collecting football game made by EA where you open packs of cards containing football players and other items
I stupidly got into FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) in one of the games from a cellphone couple years ago. I mistakenly assumed that your team from one annual release of FIFA would carry over to the next release, but I was shocked to find out that this isn't the case. EA basically deletes players FUT progress every year! Thankfully I didn't spend any money on it, so it was just time spent which was at least kind of fun, but I know some friends who have sunk a couple hundred bucks into it and they continue to buy and play the next game. I'm baffled that people put up with this. I will never touch FIFA again, until this changes. At least Fanatics can't delete your trading cards and you can resell them. Until there are similar guarantees for digital items, I don't think they will have nearly the same appeal. Valve has been the only company I know of that has done this decently with TF2, CSGO and Dota 2 skins.
I think the issue you have is real, but perhaps not quite in the way you think? if you have the full game on a console/PC, you can continue to play with your team from the previous year until maybe 3 or 4 years on when they turn off the servers, and all your work is lost forever. that's the thing I have an issue with. I'd love to go back and play with my teams from FIFA 13 or 15, but they're lost to the wind, or at least somewhere within EA's archives, at best
Your issue is an issue with the way they implement the app, which has always been a bit of an afterthought to the main game in general. Still a valid issue and must have been extremely annoying, but I suspect your case might be quite unusual in that you came into it via the app, rather than the main title. however admittedly I'm not as au fait with the FIFA world as I used to be, so that may be more common than I assume
I'm surprised that someone hasn't created a sports-themed collectible card game that uses real players for the roster.
One of the real magic things about Madden as a videogame is that it has the same teams and players you know, with stats intended to reflect their real-world performance. The result is that you can take all of the sports knowledge you already have in your head from being into football and know that knowledge materially makes you better at this videogame.
Seems like you could do the same thing for a collectible card game and make a mint.
It would be nice if anyone could just do that, but the leagues have exclusive agreements. That's why you don't see anything cool or interesting anymore in major sports video games, as the article mentions
Weirdly enough, every anecdote I've heard about Pokemon cards is that they are collected far more than played, and that most people who own them don't know how the game works.
Baseball cards had a use when, ya know, the internet and even things like printed annual references, either didn’t exist or would not have been affordable to the average kid.
yeah and, strangely, part of the value in a legendary player's "rookie card" is that it's devoid of all that useful information, because nobody at the time knew yet how good (say) Homer Simpson would be in his career
No! Not when adults fight over new boxes arriving at stores and not when a pack of 5 cards goes for $25. It’s an industry that time and again builds up a massive bubble only to see it pop from over supply.
My friends did in the 2000s, mostly as impulse buys in the checkout line when mom was paying for groceries. I still get a pack now and then because it’s fun just to see who you get.
I’m sure they’re not as popular as when they came with gum (and less popular as when they came with tobacco).
Highly doubt. Somehow video games are funding themselves selling skins. My understanding is that Gen Z eats them up. I’m a late millenial, and the Skyrim horse armor debacle was a formative experience, as such I have never paid for a skin, and neither have any of my (similarly aged) friends. Z
The whole appeal of trading cards comes from some company creating artificial scarcity on the supply of the cards, if you could just go online and order for a flat per card fee any brand new trading cards a la carte from the entire back catalog it would take away all the "fun".
Really the appeal of trading cards and foundation of scarcity goes back to the 1960s when kids would play with the cards, put them in bicycle spokes to make brrr sounds, etc. and then their parents threw their cards out or the kids did themselves when they outgrew them.
Fast forward 20-30 years and scarcity happened for cards like Mickey Mantle and other hall of fame players and prices shot up to thousands for a single card in mint condition. Kids like me hear that and buy tons of baseball cards. The lore of people with rare cards was talked about at card shops. It was cool to buy a pack and see what you got and trade with friends. Being a baseball fan at the time, it was fun to collect every player on your favorite team, maybe get cards signed by them at a game.
The fun is in the collecting, sharing, memories, etc. I'm sure there are similar stories for things like comic books and other collectibles (first edition books) where earlier releases of things are now rare. If everything were just a flat fee per card nobody would bother.
You can buy individual cards on COMC or eBay and can find pretty much anything you want that way.
Buying singles is generally regarded as the best way to build a collection, but it's not as fun as buying a pack or box of cards and seeing what you get. Collecting vs. gambling.
I think for thing like card game direct to order model might make sense.
But that would not allow you to sell all the bulk(multiple copies of same minimally useful cards) to pad profit margin. Or make the whole thing to lottery (see 1/1 One Ring). Thus driving gamblers to acquire as much product they can.
This is quite a silly comparison, because these cards are cheap to produce and trivial to manufacture relative to something like a car. The value is from the perceived scarcity, not from the perceived quality or luxury or usefulness, and the scarcity is at the whim of the manufacturer who artificially decides which cards will be scarce and which will be common.
To be fair, unlike a monopoly controlled product, Ferraris are fungible in that I can equally not be able to afford a Lamborghini, Bugatti, Koenigsegg and numerous others. We have many options for cars we can't afford. The Honda will have to do. :-)
Not a useful comparison, since the limitation isn't of the supply of cards overall but of particular cards that (other than the material printed) are identical to the common ones.
Thanks for sharing! I disagree with them saying most people have viewed fanatics taking over as a positive thing... On r/baseballcards Fanatics is not trusted or viewed well.
We do like a few of the changes they're making such as selling more stuff online so the average person can buy on release day rather than having to pay double to scalpers. But overall, fanatics is not viewed positively by anyone I know. Especially those who have been unfortunate enough to buy their sports merch as it's not done well.
I'm not sure if exclusivity is a bad thing... So what is the complete opposite of this type of monopoly? Anyone getting a license for very cheap and then just producing insane amount of cards.
In the end those cards end up being worth nothing, or below the initial sale price. Then again maybe that moment of enjoyment is enough if it is cheap.
Creating fake scarcity + random draw, looks like a lottery/casino where the slot machine is not locked/regulated.
Fanatics is trying to own the whole sports card lottery. They are going to print money in 2026.
It would be nice to have alternative venues for the sports cards addicts.
I'm not into sports but I recently saw a story on Football (soccer) Stickers aka Panini stickers. It's a massive industry over $1 billion in sales maybe $1.5 by now. edit: I see it mentions Panini hard to believe Fanatics sells more!
You can't really compete on licensed league IP, since you'd need to acquire the license, and leagues want money.
"open source" doesn't really make sense for trading cards either, since the entire point is collectibility. It's not even clear what "open source" would entail at all.
Hell, even for a trading card game what "open source" means isn't really clear: you can already create your own format if you want, you're never going to be able to play bespoke cards at sanctioned events (way too easy to abuse), would it just give you the right to "fork" the TCG and reuse as many of the existing cards & rules as you want ignoring the rest?
That hardly seems useful as you can more or less already do that, everybody understands that an MTG ETB and a Hearthstone Battlecry are the same thing, you just can't use the exact same names (let alone reuse art because that is under separate licensing).
Don’t forget the players get their money too. I’m not sure how it works for the trading cards but, for the MLB at least, players get paid for their likeness used in video games.
As an interesting aside, Barry Bonds is the only player since the 70s to opt out of the collective player licensing agreement. He figured he’d make more if he / his agent negotiated his own deals. This led to him not appearing in a lot of the licensed games from that era. Normally he got replaced by a fictitious white guy who batted right handed to avoid any possible litigation since developers didn’t want to work out a separate deal with him.
No: open source works because the economy of manufacturing software is so wierd. you can breakdown total costs into development, manufacturing, distribution. Software manufacturing and distribution cost are about as close to zero as you can get. So all it takes is one altruistic soul willing to shoulder the research cost. and there is no reoccurring manufacturing or distribution cost to burden this person. physical trading cards would have a recurring manufacturing and distribution costs. This is, strictly speaking, orthogonal to opensource, an open source trading card by definition would come with the design file used to make the card. I guess you could print your own cards.
No: the trading card appeal is scarcity of resource. there is no thrill of acquisition when you can get anything at will.
Yes: go to wikipedia and look up information of your favorite sports figures. feel free to put it in a nice template. there is your open source trading card.
I can't wait for the school yard of the future where kids just trade laminated Wikipedia printouts with each other. "Hey look, I got a rare Honus Wagner from 2007 where somebody vandalized it to say Honus Wanglord!"
Yes, but you won't like the answer. It's NFT-s. You need artificial scarcity in the digital domain for an economy to function so that trading and collecting makes sense.
npm i football-trading-cards
doesn't really cut it.
It's been a while since I was a kid, but I remember collecting car cards from gums. I was the happiest when I had something rare others didn't. Same thing with a local Magic the Gathering clone, we went nuts with it and when someone printed a card it was really frowned upon.
A sports Wiki with Creative Commons PDFs of cards could offer a free alternative to the traditional cards industry.
I'm sure that there are printing firms out there who might be interested in printing small runs of CC cards to see if they can make a consistent margin above their costs.
First, Panini is not a small newcomer trying to break in, in fact, they had exclusive rights prior to Fanatics (and still do).
This case would be much more likely to succeed if it was a newcomer trying to break in.
As a result, Panini is going to have a hell of a time arguing that because somebody else won the contracts, it's now bad.
Second, Matt literally doesn't mention it, but all Fanatics would have to do anyway is show some set of procompetitive effects of the agreements, which is fairly easy to do.
Third: He throws in some stuff about MSRP, but cites no caselaw because MSRP's are legal, and even kicking out dealers who refuse to honor them is legal.
I actually personally think MSRP and friends should have stayed per-se illegal, etc.
But it's not.
Another significant issue with this case overall is: The remedies won't fix anything - Panini will have a hell of a time showing that divestment or injunction would fix the market.
Instead, to create competition of any sort, you'd have to enjoin MLB/NFL/etc from exclusive dealing with a single trading card manufacturer.
Otherwise, whether it's panini or fanatics, you will still have a single licensed trading card manufacturer.
But MLB/et al are not party to the suit. So they can't be enjoined.
Their desire for "Fanatics is not allowed to sign exclusive contracts" would require that the MLB/et al not want exclusive contracts, which they do!
Panini knows this, and in practice they just want Fanatics to not be allowed to sign exclusive contracts. They themselves want to turn around and resign exclusive contracts forever :)
This is totally obvious to any judge, etc, and as a result, the suit will simply seem like sour grapes - they are not pissed that the market is being monopolized, they are pissed they are not the ones doing it. They will get really hard to answer questions about how the remedies will create competition in the market, rather than them monopolizing the two-party market instead.
In practice, if they want competition, they should be suing MLB/et al.
I don't give this case a super high chance of success.
It may succeed, for sure, but it's a much tougher road than Matt paints.
To play devils advocate, too late for what? Let's assume this company succeeds in their evil scheme and completely takes over the sports card market for next 50+ years, using their monopoly power to mercilessly crushing anybody who tries to compete. Unless they can use that power to muscle into a market that actually matters, what difference does it make to society.
A monopoly is a profit fountain. You can use that monopoly to leverage yourself into new monopolies (because you have capital to waste/dump e.g. Microsoft), and use that collection of monopolies to leverage yourself into political influence. Monopolies are like cancer.
edit: to expand; a monopoly is by nature a political thing. Once you control the market, you control the suppliers and retailers, and you don't actually have to manufacture or handle the products that you control. You set your suppliers prices, you set your wholesale prices, and you set your retail prices. Your real job then consists of fending off politicians/regulators that become interested in what you have, and creating politicians/regulators that will help you get more of what you want.
I’m not sure how to break this to you gracefully but you, your parents, your children, and every person you have ever met or even contemplated will die, and along with them their hopes, dreams, and preferences.
The degree to which one type of diversion “actually matters” or not should be taken in that context.
A friend of mine made tens of thousands, buying and selling trading cards. And that's what he sold, what he didn't sell is worth even more. As an investment, it beats most of the more "serious" options.
It is crazy, people pay hundreds for a pack of new cards, just so that they can sell them for thousands later, and it works! And it has been working for decades, though it has been taking ridiculous proportions for the last few years. Now, you are probably better off printing trading cards than bank notes.
Panini cards are huge (generally thought to be the more premium brand), there are millions doing it. They have trading communities, etc. A popular YouTube thing is for someone to buy a bunch of boxes and to record them opening them. I haven't bought cards in 20 years, but I remember growing up they were big. Now my nephew is into it. So GenX/Millennials and their kids are bringing it back pretty strongly.
People like collecting whatever. I buy a pack now and then at 711. It’s fun to see if you get players you like or if you pull a card that’s out of date (player is on a different team because the card was printed before the season started, or the text on the back predicts a good year when they end up having a laughably bad one, etc.)
Fanatics sports merchandise (t-shirts, etc) is probably the worst quality merchandise I’ve purchased in my life. It’s a good thing they have such a monopoly, because after a few purchases, people would seek out alternatives. I, despite being a pretty avid sports fan, have just stopped buying sports merchandise because it’s almost always Fanatics.