Sports cards boom into nearly $20 billion mainstream industry

Fanatics Fest returned to the Jacob Javits Center in New York City with more than 300 athletes and celebrities, turning sports cards and memorabilia into a full-scale sports-fandom event. What launched in 2024 as Fanatics’ push to reimagine the fan experience expanded in 2025 into a crowded mix of autograph sessions, photo opportunities, live programming and collectible auctions.

Fanatics said more than 70,000 fans attended the 2025 festival, while Sports Business Journal put total turnout at more than 125,000 across the three-day event. That scale matters because Fanatics, led by Michael Rubin, has used the festival to place itself at the center of a hobby that once lived in card shops, school lunchrooms and shoeboxes, not in a major Manhattan convention center.

The boom accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns pushed buyers online and social-media speculation amplified demand. ESPN said coronavirus, the internet and money unexpectedly fueled the biggest sports-card boom in years, a shift that changed the economics of the hobby and pulled in sellers, marketplaces and brands that had little to do with childhood collecting.

The money attached to the category now runs well beyond nostalgia. Grand View Research estimated the sports trading cards market at $13.5 billion in 2025 and projected it would reach $24.7 billion by 2033. Another market release put the broader sports memorabilia and trading cards market at $33 billion in 2025. Even the lower end of those estimates shows how the business has moved into mainstream consumer territory.

That growth has also changed who benefits. Fanatics Fest was promoted as a broader sports-fandom experience, not just a card show, and it was built to draw grail-chasing collectors alongside newcomers. Ad Age has tracked how Fanatics, Topps and Panini America fit into the industry’s rapid expansion, a sign that the biggest gains now flow to the corporate platforms organizing the market as much as to the collectors opening packs. In New York, the hobby looked less like a pastime than an asset class built around scarcity, access and scale.