Cards
Fantasy football fever has card collectors chasing their own players
Andrew “Bergie” Bergman knows it’s fantasy football season when customers start coming through his hobby shop door looking for cards of obscure rookies and backup tight ends.
It’s become quite common for card collectors and non-card collectors to try and pick up a card of every player drafted on their fantasy football team.
“Fantasy football is giving kids, adults and everybody a different way to follow the sport,” said Bergman, who owns Bergie’s Sports Card Dugout in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park. “They’re following their favorite football team but then they’re following their players on their fantasy team. So, you have a person on your fantasy football team who’s having a good season for you and, all of a sudden, you’re looking for their cards, because now they’re your favorite player.
“Back in the day, if it wasn’t a Chicago Bear or one of the top players in the sport, you didn’t care about them. And the people that play fantasy football, the knowledge they have of the sport itself and of the individual players is insane. People come in here and ask about names that I don’t even know who they are, and I’ll look them up and they’re a top five or 10 fantasy football players because they get touchdowns.”
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Fantasy football has been popular for decades. According to Scoutcast.ai, roughly 40 million Americans play fantasy football annually. For the 2025 season, ESPN reported 14 million users of its fantasy website, while Yahoo also set a record with an estimated seven million players.
With the resurgence of trading cards over the last five-plus years, a direct correlation between the fantasy game and collecting has become unmistakable.
“I think there is absolutely a correlation between fantasy football and collecting,” said Joe Orlando, the former president of PSA who recently returned to the card-grading company as its head of special projects. “Fantasy football has not only created more engagement with existing fans, but it has also introduced new people to the sport. Fantasy football gives people extra motivation to learn more about the players and watch more games, which makes people more emotionally invested. So much of what collectors do is driven by emotion.
“Fantasy football can only help create more fans, which leads to more hobby participation, if people have the predisposition to collect in the first place.”
David Gonos was in high school in the 1980s when he first heard about fantasy football in 1989. A lifelong card collector, the fantasy aspect intrigued him. For the last 37 years, Gonos has been collecting the players that he drafts in his league.
“Fantasy football is a way for me to collect players instead of collecting cards,” Gonos said. “It’s a similar thing, and my collection goes up against this guy’s collection. Then the next week, I go up against this guy’s collection. It was just another way of creating a collection of players who I believe will outperform their value. It was just another way to build a team. And you’re learning about rookies, about guys that are coming out of nowhere. Then it helped me in my appreciation for cards, and vice versa—as I’m collecting cards, it’s helping me appreciate the players.”
Gonos, who writes about collecting and fantasy football on his website encourages fantasy football owners to collect their players.
“To me, it makes sense,” Gonos said. “Here’s where they diverge: sports card collectors are generally more appreciative of history, and fantasy players are generally more attuned to the future, at least when you look at players individually. So, anyone that’s into collecting now and getting this year’s cards, all they’re looking at is the future, and I think that’s kind of become a generational thing these days.”
Gonos said a collector might pull an autographed card of a player they don’t care about but they will start rooting for them because it could increase the card’s value.
“Similar, I think that happens in fantasy where maybe it’s somebody you did hit with a card and now because you’ve become a fan of that guy and you’ve done a little more research, oh, what’s this guy all about?” Gonos said. “Say Kenyon Sadiq, the tight end for the Jets. I pulled his autograph, maybe this guy’s going to do something. So, then at the end of your draft you’ll throw a flyer on Kenyon Sadiq.”
FANTASY IMPACT
Scott Mahlum first recalls playing fantasy football about 1990.
In 1991, he opened his card shop Mill Creek Sports in the Seattle suburb of Mill Creek, Wash. He had a fantasy football league for his shop that first year. One of the guy’s in the league worked at a newspaper and he would tally up the scores each week by tediously combing through box scores at his job. In pre-internet days, everything had to be done by hand.
When CBS launched the first fantasy football application in 1997, it was a game changer—quite literally. The other large media outlets such as ESPN and Yahoo Sports quickly followed suit.
“It all became automated, and I think that’s when fantasy football just boomed, when it was accessible for everybody,” Mahlum said. “Then, all of a sudden, that collecting base for football really took off. It became closer to the basketball numbers. Fantasy football has definitely had a huge impact on the hobby.”
Bergman—who also opened his shop in 1991, some 2,000 miles away from Mahlum—remembers the uptick in popularity of fantasy football and cards in the late 1990s.
Prior to the internet making fantasy football easier than ever, Mahlum used to host in-person drafts in his shop.
Drafts nowadays are predominantly conducted online; in-person participation isn’t required. However, getting fans together once a year to rekindle friendships and talk smack is always preferred method for a draft by fantasy owners.
Bergman has recently had customers ask to have their drafts at his hobby shop. He hasn’t given the go-ahead yet on that. However, he thinks card stores hosting drafts will become a lot more prevalent in the coming years.
“It seems like it’s something that Fanatics and Topps is trying to promote,” Bergman said. “I think we’re probably a year or two away from that. But I think that is going to be a thing that Fanatics is pushing, that a lot of stores are going to push to have them host fantasy football draft parties, probably in conjunction with the release of the 2027 or ’28 cards. When you do your draft and you open up boxes of cards, I think that’s definitely something that is coming everywhere.”
PERFORMANCE IMPACT
The popularity and value of specific positions for players has certainly fluctuated over the years.
When Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders was in his prime, he was very impactful in fantasy football and his card prices reflected that—and they still do.
“Barry was the one, because he had his rookie card in ’89, and he was still in his prime when fantasy kind of exploded,” Mahlum said. “[Brett] Favre was a big one for fantasy. Then when Peyton Manning came along, it was his rookie year when fantasy boomed. I remember him having a big influx of people wanting his rookies because of that.”
Running backs prior to Sanders and during his 10-year career left their marks in fantasy football, including Walter Payton, Franco Harris, Earl Campbell, Tony Dorsett, Bo Jackson and Emmitt Smith.
In 2026, arguably the top two players on every fantasy draft board for PPR leagues were Detroit Lions’ Jahmyr Gibbs and Atlanta Falcons’ Bijan Robinson. The two running backs are coming off solid 2025 campaigns.
“It used to be that the wide receiver and quarterback were at the top of drafts for everyone. But it seems like running backs are once again very, very popular and very hot and are going very high in fantasy drafts,” Bergman said. “The running back position is now very valued, especially in fantasy football and will equate to running backs maybe having higher card value than they did the previous bunch of years.”
Card prices for Gibbs and Robinson are respectable. However, other top-notch running backs haven’t had the same financial outlook. Collectors aren’t going after players such as the Cincinnati Bengals’ Chase Brown and Buffalo Bills’ James Cook—even though Cook’s older brother, Dalvin, had plenty of interest in his cards when he first came into the league as a highly-touted running back.
“In sports card collecting, it’s all about the quarterbacks. Period. That’s the end of the story,” Gonos said. “In fantasy, quarterbacks are like an afterthought. I’ll draft one towards the end. There’s only 12 of them getting drafted in a league, and the 12th best quarterback is still pretty great. But running backs, receivers, those are gold. But in the card collecting world, they’re cool and they’re nice to get, but you’re kind of like, ‘Aww, it’s not the quarterback.’”
A player’s performance each week directly impacts their fantasy value as well as the prices of their cards.
“Fantasy football is played in real time, and the collectibles market reacts in real time as well, with or without the fantasy element,” Orlando said. “Since the NFL season only features 17 regular-season games, every week’s performance can have such a major impact on the market for a player’s cards and collectibles. It is true in other sports as well, but the NFL season plays a fraction of the number of games the other sports do, which means every game has greater significance. Due to the sheer number of options collectors now have available to sell their collectibles, the market has never been more in sync with game-to-game athlete performance.”
Bergman has watched players have a great week on the gridiron and their cards will spike in interest and value.
“Every Monday or Tuesday you have a new, hot player—someone had a great fantasy week and hopefully their regular team won,” Bergman said. “That helps a lot, but even if they didn’t, and a player had an individual great game, then all of a sudden, their cards are up that week. It’s such a week to week thing now, just like everything in this world. You can have a guy that’s cards go up 20% or 30% off of one good game.”
