Run of the Show: The Hobby

In July, Topps had the 2025-26 NBA Rookie of the Year, Cooper Flagg, sign a Chrome NBA Debut Patch card at Fanatics Fest in New York. That August, card collector Jason Williams pulled the card from a livestreamed card break after paying $515 for a Dallas Mavericks slot. A month and a half later, the card sold for $8.04 million through the Fanatics Collect’s September public auction.

The price marked the highest Debut Patch card sale to date by $5 million — a fact that sends an important message about fans’ increasing desire for community and connection.

LARGER STORY

This Flagg sale stands to be one data point in a larger story that has been building around the return of Topps to the major leagues.

After 15 years away from basketball trading cards, Topps debuted an NBA-licensed release in 2025. It brought collectors out in droves. The crowd lined up for hours outside the Fifth Avenue NBA store to nab some, growing so large that NYPD officers had to manage and eventually disperse it. When Cooper Flagg, the player on the record-setting card, opened a card trading store in his home state of Maine, collectors waited up to seven hours before opening to nab some.

Topps saw the same excitement with their revival of football trading cards. In April, Topps returned as the NFL’s exclusive trading card licensee with the league’s first licensed football cards since 2016. To celebrate, Solomon Group designed and built a three-day collector event around the 2026 NFL Draft in Pittsburgh that drew 75,000 card collectors and some 20,000 cards.

This pattern holds across the hobby’s biggest stages. Fanatics Fest drew more than 125,000 people over three days in 2025, up from 70,000 the year before. The National Sports Collectors Convention reported more than 100,000 visitors in 2025, setting its third straight record.

Eventbrite’s 2026 social study described a “Reset to Real” among young adults: 74% of Gen Z said that in-person experiences matter more to them than digital ones, and 79% of 18-to-35-year-olds said they planned to attend more events this year. Stanford researcher Roberta Katz found a similar thread in her interviews: young people feeling oversaturated by social media and yearning for deeper in-person interactions. The rise of run clubs, board game cafés and, as seen here, the return of the hobby tells the same story. The cards themselves had not changed the world. What drew people was the chance to be there for the return of something they had missed.

TAKEAWAY

Collector Jason Williams’ wife Lacy told The Athletic what she loved most about the hobby was that it “brought [the family] together,” adding, “We all get excited when we find different cards and sit down and rip them at the table.” Cooper Flagg told reporters that part of his motivation to open a store was to tackle the difficulty of collecting in a region without major shops. In other words, the NBA Rookie of the Year looked at his hometown and found it was not a sense of community that was missing, but rather a lack of inventory.

For anyone building experiences around a fan community, the lesson is straightforward. People may show up for the product, but it is the community behind that product that will bring them back time and again. The most meaningful thing a brand can create beyond a product is a purpose. And when you give that purpose a physical setting, fans will show up to revel in that purpose together.

If this resonated, we’d love to hear from you.