Cards
New Fanatics flagship store in London attracts collectors to one of busiest shopping areas in Europe
London offers some of the most famous landmarks in the world: Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and Big Ben, just to name a few.
For trading card collectors, London also can now be looked at as a destination for getting their hobby fix.
Fanatics Collectibles—under the Fanatics and Topps umbrellas—opened its first-ever flagship store in the heart of one of the most bustling cities in Europe. Located on famed Regent Street in London, the flagship store is prime real estate to attract current and future collectors of all kinds.
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The store hosted its grand opening on April 25 with Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin, Topps President of Trading Cards David Leiner, and Formula 1 superstar Lewis Hamilton kicking off the event.
To commemorate the exciting moment, Rubin ripped open a box of store-exclusive F1 cards.
A few weeks after the store opened, Leiner told SCD that traffic had exceeded expectations.
“The crowds have been strong, the traffic’s been strong, sales have been great,” Leiner said. “What excites me most is people getting educated, the market aspect and really creating. The hobby is all about community and sharing and it’s a really fun hobby. We’re getting a great mix of locals; we’re getting tourists. We’re right on Regents Street near Piccadilly Circus, so it’s prime real estate in London.”
In a European region that’s underserved in the hobby, Fanatics Collectibles is making its mark in a big way.
“The store is very popular. We’re seeing a lot of folks that are new to the hobby, which is really, really great,” Leiner said. “When we built the store, there were kind of a couple ideas in mind. First and foremost, there aren’t a ton of hobby stores in Europe, and there’s really only one sports-orientated store in London. What we wanted to do is kind of create an experience, market the hobby, bring new folks in and for existing folks, obviously, help them out as well.”
LOCATION IS EVERYTHING
As the saying goes in business, “Location is everything.” That’s certainly true for Fanatics’ flagship store, which is in a major, high-scale shopping hub.
The shop boasts 8,647 square feet, with 6,000 of that usable retail space.
“The store is just an elevated experience,” Leiner said. “It’s crisp, it’s clean, a lot of digital signage. We’re going to be doing takeovers of the store very frequently. We built it so that in a day we could do an Arsenal takeover, we could do a VeeFriends takeover, we could do a Premier League takeover, an NBA, an NFL when we get those rights and they do London games or international games. So, I really like the fact that it’s an elevated experience. That doesn’t mean expensive, by the way. It puts the hobby on the pedestal that it deserves to be on.”
Soccer is the most popular sport in Europe and that equates to card collecting as well. Formula 1 is the second biggest sport. The flagship store features everything from Lionel Messi signed cleats, rare Erling Haaland cards and unopened product of the big soccer leagues. Autographed helmets from F1 stars and their cards also highlight that sport.
Along with soccer and F1, Fanatics is introducing football, basketball and baseball cards to collectors in Europe.
“We have a wide array,” Leiner said. “For the local audience, it tends to lean more soccer, Formula 1. We have our Star Wars cards featured, our Marvel, our Disney, all of that. We have baseball cards there. We do carry the full suite of products. … We do all the drops. When the new drops come out, we have local release dates. We’ll have some more exclusive products as well for the store in the future. We’re looking at doing those maybe on a quarterly or so cadence to drive some excitement. There’s a little bit of something for everyone.”
Expect Fanatics to go all out when it secures the exclusive NBA trading card license on Oct. 1 and the NFL early in 2026.
Fanatics will take over the licenses for the Premier League on Aug. 1, NBA on Oct. 1, and NFL on April 1, 2026.
“We’re going to come out and make a big splash, bring in fans and collectors and really continue to try to build the momentum,” Leiner said. “We have three terrific partners in the Premier League, NBA and NFL coming on board, so we want to delight all the fans and collectors that support those licenses and sports.”
BIG COLLABORATION
When the Fanatics Collectibles shop opened, it marked a collaboration between two of the industry’s largest and most impactful companies in Fanatics and PSA.
PSA, the leaders in third-party grading and authentication, has an area at the back of the flagship store where collectors can submit cards for grading.
“One of the things we were really excited about doing along with Fanatics is making it easy to go from a box break to be able to do a submission,” Ryan Miller, general manager of PSA International, told SCD. “So, next to the breaking area that they have in the store, PSA actually has a booth area. It’s kind of a store within a store concept. Customers are able to go straight from breaking to doing a drop off with a Fanatics-trained employee that’s well-versed in the PSA services and our practices.”
Allowing collectors to be able to drop off their cards instead of having to ship them to the United States to get graded is a major step for PSA. Miller said it’s cutting down on friction points. It’s a completely safe and secure dropoff where cards are handed directly to a Fanatics Collectibles employee.
“For the customer, it’s such a win,” Miller said. “You don’t have to worry about first shipping it to another location within the U.K., and especially you don’t have to think about shipping it internationally, which is such a challenge with everything that’s going on right now in the world with tariffs. It’s such a benefit to not have to think about that.”
Miller is ecstatic PSA has a presence in such a hobby-altering shop within the growing international market.
“You can’t really get a better location than Regent Street,” Miller said. “There’s something kind of surreal about seeing a double-decker bus coming down Regent Street and you have Lionel Messi cleats and PSA graded cards outside of Regent Street.
“One of the goals I believe for Fanatics is to have this store the home of the hobby and to have it be represented and so accessible. Regent Street, if it’s not the highest foot traffic area in Europe, it’s definitely up there. To have this where it’s front and center so children, parents, collectors walking down the street are now familiar with collecting. I think it makes it much more accessible to your everyday customer that’s maybe curious but maybe hasn’t had a card shop near them. Now they can just pop in, see cards, check out some of the other options Fanatics has there as well.”
FURTHER EXPANSION
Both Fanatics and PSA are looking at further expanding their international reach.
PSA has an office in Canada, a second office coming later this year in Toronto, an office for grading in Japan, and an office in Shanghai. In 2026, PSA will open its first European office at an undetermined location in Germany, noted Miller.
“One of our missions is to make collecting safe, easy and fun. We don’t just mean that for domestic customers; we mean that for customers around the globe,” Miller said. “I think if you were to ask a customer in Europe today if it’s easy to do a submission to PSA, I don’t think they would say it is.”
As for Fanatics, its brass believes there are so many opportunities internationally.
“Further opportunities in Europe—we’re scouting out a few places we’re interested in,” Leiner said. “Latin America is another growth market for us that we’ve looked at. Asia, predominantly we’ve looked in Japan and we’ve looked in China. We’re exploring other locations. We want to make sure that if we do decide to open another flagship store, we do it right. The current store in London, we’re gathering as much feedback as possible. We want to be great.”
Leiner doesn’t see any need for Fanatics to open any locations in the United States because he said the hobby stores are as healthy as they have ever been.
Leiner is hoping collectors are inspired by the London flagship store and they want to go out and open their own store.
“We would love for folks to do that—take the lead, we’ll support them,” said Leiner, who has been around the hobby for 16 years. “We’ve seen so much hobby store growth in the U.S., so many folks confident in what we’re doing, how we’re marketing the category, how we’re cultivating collectors.
“Coming back out of the pandemic, a lot of folks got back into the hobby, a lot of folks were unsure if the ‘bubble’ is going to burst. I think during the pandemic things accelerated. There was already a lot of good momentum pre-pandemic and it accelerated during the pandemic, and it’s only continued to accelerate. We continue to market and invest and cultivate that culture.”
