Several sources have reported today that Topps, the company best known for selling sports cards, has been acquired by the sports retailer Fanatics.
How do you think this move will effect the trading card industry? How will this acquisition affect Pokemon?
Articles:
New York Times - Topps will sell its sports card business to Fanatics, a rival
ESPN - Fanatics acquires Topps’ trading cards and collectables businesses
I’ll kick off the discussion.
I remember Topps from my youth. For Pokemon, it was the cards and the checklists that stand out the most. They took many of the images from the anime and films and turned them into cards. And for sports, it was baseball. Specifically the Minnesota Twins. I remember looking through bins upon bins of baseball cards thinking the shiny ones would one day be worth something. I think this acquisition will remind people of Topps, a final vestige to a fading era.
Cool to see collectibles being taken more seriously, but I doubt this will have much affect on Pokemon.
This is slightly(?) off topic, but when did Topps stop making Pokemon cards, and why?
I wonder if they got a discount on it since they bought the licensing to most everything they printed before they bought the company themselves lol. Fanatics making moves.
Will be interesting to see if we get some collector oriented Pokémon products down the line through Topps. multi-level marketing series 0 was interesting.
I’m more of a Bottoms guy
Writing was on the wall when dacardworld announced their partnership with topps for a flagship baseball card shop in Cooperstown a month ago (despite topps not having rights to print mlb). Cool to see headlines like this, but don’t really see how this affects Pokémon unless they work with dacardworld to open more brick and mortar shops in high traffic shopping areas and are open to carrying Pokémon.
Yes, a steep discount. Article I read earlier said how their failed SPAC after Fanatics got the MLB license was valued at over 1 billion. Word is that Fanatics just got Topps for only 500 mil so that’s half price.
It will definitely be interesting to see what the hobby feels over the next 3-10 years from all of these big acquisitions over the last year. Could be nothing. Could be a squeeze on prices. Ideally, I’d like to think that there would be an effort put into advertising and creatively growing the audience base, but I’m pessimistic overall.
The whole MLB license thing just felt, idk, gross? It all made sense from a business perspective and whatnot. But seeing a 100+ year history dismantled so that a modern merch company can finesse the profits out of trading cards just kinda sucks? Maybe it is me being overly sentimental about the hobby, but I don’t feel /good/ or /excited/ about these types of deals. I usually just hope that they won’t make my experience as a collector worse. And innovation is usually not on the agenda with acquisitions from what I’ve read/seen. It seems like its usually just a heads up that prices are going to increase.
The new deal doesn’t seem to include their candy or gift card businesses, just the cards business, so it’s hard to compare but it’s definitely at least as a small discount to the failed SPAC.
I am really disappointed that Fantatics is a real reputable company, I thought the news was it had been bought out by some eccentric billionaire who’d bought it to have it produce stuff for his cult or whatever…
Pentagon
I think I join a lot of people in hoping they give us a Topps Chrome Series 3 finally with generation 2 Spectra, Sparkle, Tekno since Topps owns the Chrome technology. It’s a LONG shot but I think it would perform well and the current owners clearly had no interest in doing so. Just a hopeful thought.