Tom Brady attends the Fanatics and Topps ‘Hobby Rip Night’ event with Michael Rubin, Tom Brady, Kevin Hart and Travis Scott on September 30, 2023 in Linwood, New Jersey.
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Since New York Comic-Con launched in 2006, the convention has grown far beyond comics into a wide-ranging fan celebration of anime, video games, television, film and all things pop culture, attracting more than 200,000 attendees. last year.
Now, Fanatics wants to do the same thing, but for sports, hosting a three-day event in New York in August that aims to be at the center of sports fandom, culture and collecting.
Lance Fensterman, CEO of Fanatics Events and the former president of ReedPop — where he produced pop culture events like New York Comic-Con, Complex-Con and Star Wars Celebration — said he sees several parallels between pop culture fans and fans. of sports. However, he noted, while events like New York Comic-Con have evolved to embrace multiple diverse fan bases and communities, the sports-focused event space is “poised to be disrupted a little bit.”
“You have collector shows and card shows, and there are thousands of those across the U.S., and they’re great for collectors. You also have fan festivals that are sponsored by the league and the team and are very specific to that sport or team,” said Fensterman. “What we’re trying to do is combine the best elements of all of that and then culture and entertainment.”
The three-day event, called Fanatics Fest NYC, will take place at New York’s Javits Center, the massive convention center that has hosted New York Comic-Con, the New York International Auto Show and other major conventions and events. The event will feature multiple stages and theaters, interactive features and games, merchandise and trading card areas, and a museum exhibit of rare cards and sports memorabilia. Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, Eli and Peyton Manning, Kevin Durant, Sabrina Ionescu and Hulk Hogan are just some of the big names in sports scheduled to appear, Fensterman said.
The event will also try to go beyond sports by incorporating entrepreneurs, entertainers and cultural influencers into the programming, Fensterman said, providing a platform to talk about how sports serve as a platform for inspiration. There will be exclusive apparel collaborations and a variety of unique products from the hundreds of teams and leagues that Fanatics partners with, which includes nearly every professional sports organization in the US including the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, UFC and WWE.
“These are the moments we get excited about and we just don’t see it happening anywhere else in the live sports world,” Fensterman said.
Fanatics Events, which launched last July in partnership with Endeavor-owned talent management company IMG, held its first large-scale activation last week, overseeing WWE World at WrestleMania, a five-day festival that ran alongside the top WWE event in Philadelphia. According to Fanatics, the festival was the highest-grossing and most-attended fan event in WWE history.
Fanatics Events’ WWE World at WrestleMania, a five-day festival held alongside WWE’s flagship event in Philadelphia.
With this broader sports effort, Fanatics Fest NYC will help the Fanatics Events team pursue coincident business goals: to scale the other Fanatics business verticals and build a new business around sports events.
Tickets for the event will range from $20 to $400, and general admission tickets for adults will cost $50 per day. Fensterman said his goal is to draw between 50,000 and 100,000 fans for this inaugural event, which could potentially spark other smaller-scale events across the country. The company will also look to host events in international markets, helping league partners looking to build fan bases overseas, he said.
This new series of events will also help fuel the company’s other business segments: the merchandising and merchandising division, the collectibles and trading card businesses, the live streaming shopping operations and the sports betting division.
Fanatics, a three-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company ranked 21st in 2022, has evolved beyond the commercial roots in which Michael Rubin founded the company. The company’s rapid rise has helped it amass a valuation of more than $31 billion and put it on track for a potential IPO. He has also put a magnifying glass on the company’s movements. The company says it was wrongly accused of issues related to Major League Baseball jerseys this spring, and is also in a legal battle with DraftKings over its expansion into sports betting.