Michael Rubin, founder and CEO of Fanatics, speaks at the CNBC Game Plan Summit in New York City on July 16, 2026.
Shea Kastrinor | CNBC
Since founding Fanatics in 2011, Michael Rubin has built the company from a small online retailer of sports merchandise and apparel into a large global sports platform.
Not only is Fanatics by far the biggest player in the sports apparel industry, with contracts in place with nearly every major league on the planet, but it also now has a large footprint in the collectibles, sports betting, and prediction markets. The company also plans to issue its own branded credit cards this year.
Fanatics’ wide network of sports and sports fans comes alive this week at the annual Fanatics Fest. This is the third year of the company’s effort to create a Comic-Con-style event for sports fans.
Speaking with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Thursday at the CNBC Sports x Boardroom Game Plan Summit, held in conjunction with Fanatics Fest in New York City, Rubin said the company expects more than 200,000 people to attend the four-day event.
In addition to this, there are more than 150 million fans who are Fanatics customers across a variety of sports-specific businesses, including jersey purchases, trading cards, and betting.
Rubin appeared on CNBC in May and said the company’s sales would approach $14 billion this year. By comparison, the company’s total revenue in 2024 was about $8 billion, according to a previous CNBC report.
“We believe that we probably have the greatest opportunity in sports, because we’re not in any particular business,” Rubin told Sorkin on Game Plan. “We think of ourselves as a platform that gives digital sports fans everything they want.”
Fanatics focuses on three revenue streams: merchandise, collectibles and betting and gaming, and “should create the most important company in sports,” Rubin said. “We think it has the potential to be the most valuable company in sports.”
The company’s last public funding round was in December 2022, when it raised $700 million, giving it a valuation of $31 billion. The company, which has made CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list three times, has been rumored to be interested in going public in recent years, but Rubin told CNBC last year that there was “no need to rush to go public.”
But even with these successes, Rubin told Sorkin in Game Plan, “We think there are some opportunities to leverage our relationships with customers, sports facilities and athletes to generate new business that we don’t do.”
“We think we have a lot of growth,” Rubin said. “Ten years from now, I think there will be some businesses that are just as important as the three today.”
Rubin declined to say what kind of business they are. But he also mentioned what Fanatics isn’t pursuing: ticket sales and live sports coverage.
Ticketing is a “tough business…it’s a complicated business. There’s a lot of competitors,” Rubin said. “The content providers, the teams, the artists keep all the money and that’s the way it should be. So it’s a business we’re never going to be in.”
Regarding becoming a sports broadcast platform, Rubin said, “There’s a lot of big companies out there…that’s a business we want to serve popcorn and pay attention to.”
“But there are other businesses that I think can make it better for the fans,” he said. “We can do something different and better for them than what is currently being done.”
This strategy is currently being driven by two recent situations in which Rubin and Fanatics “got punched in the face on some things.”
The first was when Fanatics announced it would make NHL on-ice jerseys starting with the 2024-2025 season. “There were about 10,000 really vocal hockey fans (saying) they don’t want you to take over the hockey jersey,” he said.
Fanatics faced an even bigger jersey-focused controversy when it began working with Nike on new MLB jersey templates in 2024. Nike’s redesign resulted in a major overhaul of the jersey after the jersey received heavy criticism for its quality and appearance compared to previous jerseys.
“This was actually the best thing that ever happened to me, because we got our team together and said, ‘Wait a minute, what are we going to do about this?'” Rubin said. “We never had a brand purpose, and we always thought it was strategic bullshit.[But]it was time to[say]what our brand purpose was. We said it was to continually improve the fan experience.”
“Five years ago we took money, but now we don’t take money unless it relentlessly improves the fan experience,” Rubin said.
“People ask me why I don’t get into the ticketing business, and no one likes being in the ticketing business, even if you’re talking about how to make billions of dollars a year,” he said. “I don’t want to be in that business. I want to be in a business where we can celebrate fandom like we do here.”
Rubin said that moment was “the greatest thing that ever happened to us, because it really made us think.”
“We don’t want to be big, we want to be loved,” Rubin said. “For us to be loved, we must continually improve the fan experience.”
