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Michael Rubin: Fanatics Fan Fest NYC will be Comic Con for sports
When Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin first attended the National Sports Collectors Convention, he was blown away by the size of the crowd and the scale of the hobby’s largest card show.
But Rubin also knew he wanted to do something different, something with more bells and whistles and the flash and flare of a Comic Con. Fanatics will host its first big event this weekend with Fanatics Fest NYC.
Rubin said in an interview on CNBC this week that the idea for the first Fanatics events came from The National, the annual five-day card show that has drawn record crowds of 100,000 that last few years, including more than 100,000 for the show in Cleveland last month.
“The funny thing is, that’s really where the idea comes from,” Rubin told CNBC. “I always have two reactions when I go there. The first is, this is unbelievable. There are 150,000 collectors that are coming to this show. The second thing is, it doesn’t look that different from when you and I were kids. … That’s why I went to Comic Con.
“[The National] is an incredible show but it hasn’t changed much, it hasn’t evolved. Then I went to Comic Con and said, ‘This is spectacular, why aren’t we having this for sports?’ I said, ‘Find out who runs Comic Con,’ and I met that guy, Lance Festerman, and said, ‘Hey, great news, you’re going to come to Fanatics and you’re going to start Fanatics Fest.’ That was really the origin of it.”
Fanatics Fest is the product of Fanatics Events, which the company launched last year to produce its own card and hobby shows. Fanatics Fest NYC will be more sports festival than card show and will feature some of the biggest names in sports, from Tom Brady and Peyton Manning to Derek Jeter, David Ortiz, Kevin Durant, and Mike Tyson.
“I’m excited. There has never been a sports festival ever in the world, and you think about so many other industries that have them. You have Comic Con in NYC, [which] gets 250,000 people dressed in their favorite costumes walking around and taking over New York City, and you have all the music festivals, but no one has ever done this in sports,” Rubin said. “We’re the perfect company to bring together hundreds of the best athletes in the world and all the leagues and teams together, and it’s incredible for sports fans.”
While The National is focused more on sports card and memorabilia dealers, as well the TRISTAR Autograph Pavilion, Fanatics Fest will be focused more on the stars of the sports world. While there will be trading cards and memorabilia available, including a card trading pit for collectors, Fanatics Fest NYC is all about current and former stars interacting with fans.
The event will feature numerous panel discussions and Q&As with athletes, as well as what Rubin calls “stunts” between athletes and fans. Many of the top online and social media streamers will be at the event streaming live content.
Also See: How The National ‘broke’ Cleveland
Rubin hopes the content produced during the event will “take over social media this week and be the most relevant thing on social media.”
“The show is really a sports festival,” Rubin told CNBC. “… As a sports fan, you can go for the entire weekend and just watch great content, but then there are going to be so many stunts with the athletes interacting.”
One social media influencer who will be involved is Gary Vaynerchuk, a collector and entrepreneur who started VeeFriends trading and game cards for kids. Gary Vee, a fixture at the NSCC and other big card shows, says Fanatics Fest NYC will be a different show than The National.
“I think it’s more of a sports Comic Con with some cards,” he said. “It will be very different. It will be more Comic Con.”
Gary Vee says there is a place in the hobby for a different kind of show. He’s been impressed with the impact Rubin and Fanatics have had on the hobby since purchasing Topps and acquiring the official trading card licenses for MLB, NFL and NBA.
“I think Michael Rubin is one of the great businessmen of this era and he’s been a huge positive for the hobby,” Gary Vee said at The National. “We’ll see what they continue to do because I think they are doing a lot of good for the hobby. I think people get over-fixated on they are trying to eat up everything. It doesn’t work like that. As big as they are, they have all the big licenses, but Topps had all the big licenses when you and I were growing up. It ebbs and flows. Panini had it all, except for Topps I’m not over-worried by that.”
Fanatics will hold two more big events this year, one at PNC Park in Pittsburgh in September and another in Orlando in November. It plans to hold four or more shows per year and eventually expand internationally.
“When the dream kind of popped into my brain, it was how do we do the Comic Con of sports or how to do have Fanatics Fest in every big city in the world,” Rubin said. “The U.S. may only be able to do this in two or three cities, maybe New York City … LA, maybe Chicago. But why don’t we do this in Paris? Why don’t we do this in Brazil? Why don’t we do this in China or Tokyo?”
Jeff Owens is the editor of SCD.
