No more Topps baseball cards? MLB ending deal with iconic brand after 70 years

In a major shake-up to the trading cards industry, MLB has agreed to move on from Topps when their licensing agreement ends after 2025.

The new official trading card company for MLB and its players' union will be created and overseen by sports-merchandise giant Fanatics.

Topps has partnered with MLB for 70 years and is an iconic brand in the sports-collectibles space. Losing baseball could deal a crippling blow to the New York-based company, which announced in April it was planning to merge with Mudrick Capital Acquisition Corp II and go public in a deal valuing the resultant combined venture at $1.3 billion.

People familiar with the situation confirmed reporting by the Wall Street Journal that in addition to MLB and the MLBPA, the NBA and its players' union plus the NFLPA will all have stakes in the new company formed by Fanatics. The basketball and football entities have licensing agreements with Panini America.

MLBPA head Tony Clark sent a memo to his members claiming that the agreement with Fanatics would bring the union far more revenue than any previous deal. A person familiar with the negotiations confirmed that Topps could not come close to matching the offer from Fanatics.

An online retailer with designs on expanding its revenue streams, Fanatics was recently valued at $18 billion, per CNBC. The company's chairman, Michael Rubin, owns the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers and the NHL's New Jersey Devils.

The NHL and the NHLPA have trading card licensing agreements with Upper Deck, while Topps provides a digital trading card platform for the hockey league. Topps, run by former Walt Disney Co. chairman Michael Eisner, also manufactures official trading cards for several major soccer entities, including MLS, the German Bundesliga and the UEFA Champions League, as well as for Formula One.

Separate agreements are needed to license both a given sports league's logos and other branding marks and players' names and likenesses from their unions.

Starting as a chewing-gum business in Brooklyn in 1938, Topps began putting cards in packs of gum in 1949 and released its first series of baseball cards in 1951. A rare 1952 Topps card featuring New York Yankees legend Mickey Mantle set a record in January by selling for $5.2 million — nearly double what it fetched in 2018 — before a Honus Wagner card dated to 1909-11 sparked a $6.6 million purchase last week.