Who owns Fanatics? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Fanatics is one of the most valuable private companies in American sports, yet most fans know it only as the brand on the jersey they bought online. Behind that storefront sits a business that has raised roughly $4.9 billion, absorbed the century-old Topps trading-card empire, and launched a national sportsbook, all while staying off the public markets.

The person at the center of it is Michael Rubin, a college dropout who assembled Fanatics from assets that eBay did not want. He controls the company through a mix of a large economic stake and super-voting shares, a structure that lets a crowd of powerful outside investors fund the company without taking the wheel.

Understanding who owns Fanatics means separating three things: who put in the money, who holds the votes, and who the leagues and unions are that sit on the cap table for strategic reasons rather than financial ones. Those three groups do not overlap neatly, and that is the whole story of the company's control.

Fanatics began in 1995 as Football Fanatics, a single sports-merchandise store opened by brothers Alan and Mitchell Trager near Jacksonville, Florida. The modern company traces to 2011, when Michael Rubin's e-commerce firm GSI Commerce acquired Fanatics. Later that year eBay bought GSI Commerce for about $2.4 billion, keeping the order-fulfillment business and letting Rubin buy back the consumer brands, including Fanatics, into a holding company that became Kynetic.

Fanatics is headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, with major operations in New York. Its business now runs across three arms. Fanatics Commerce sells licensed apparel and merchandise for hundreds of leagues, teams, and players, and includes the Lids retail chain. Fanatics Collectibles is the trading-card business built around Topps, which Fanatics acquired in 2022. Fanatics Betting & Gaming operates the Fanatics Sportsbook and iGaming products.

The company does not publish audited financials, but it has disclosed revenue milestones. Revenue reached about $8.1 billion in 2024 and roughly $13 billion in 2025 by the company's own account. Commerce remains the largest arm, while Collectibles grew fastest, reaching an estimated $5 billion in 2025. These figures come from the company and trade reporting rather than public filings, so they should be read as reported estimates.

Fanatics is privately held and has never been listed on a stock exchange. It has no ticker, no public market cap, and no obligation to file financial statements with the SEC. Rubin has repeatedly said the company is not rushing toward an IPO, arguing that its balance sheet does not require public capital. Its shares change hands only through negotiated funding rounds and occasional employee liquidity programs, not open trading.

Michael Rubin is the controlling shareholder. Multiple reports put his economic stake at roughly a third of the company, held through his private holding company Kynetic. More important than the size of that stake is its voting power: Rubin holds super-voting shares that give him majority control of shareholder votes even though outside investors collectively own most of the equity. That structure lets him direct strategy, acquisitions, and the pace of any eventual IPO without needing investor approval. The precise share counts and the exact voting multiple are not publicly disclosed, which is consistent with Fanatics' status as a private company.

Fanatics has raised money in a long series of private rounds since Rubin took control, moving from a sports-merchandise retailer to a multi-category platform. The table below lists the major priced rounds and their reported valuations. Amounts and valuations are drawn from company statements and trade reporting, not audited filings.

Clearlake Capital led the December 2022 round and is reported as one of the largest institutional holders. Silver Lake has backed Fanatics since 2015 and its co-CEO Greg Mondre sits on the board. SoftBank invested about $1 billion through its Vision Fund in 2017, the round that first pushed the valuation past $4 billion, in the same era of large private bets that also runs through SoftBank's own ownership. Fidelity and BlackRock hold smaller institutional stakes. Earlier investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, Temasek, Alibaba, and Thrive Capital.

A distinctive feature of Fanatics' cap table is the presence of sports bodies themselves. The NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS, and players unions including the NFLPA and MLBPA, along with individual team owners and athletes, together hold about 10% of the company. Their stakes are strategic. They align the leagues that grant Fanatics its merchandise and trading-card licenses with the company's success, a structure closer to a partnership than a passive financial investment.

There is no public company structure to describe. Fanatics has no float, no ticker, and no exchange listing. It has laid groundwork associated with future public companies, including hiring a chief financial officer with public-markets experience and running employee liquidity programs, but Rubin has said the company will go public only when it chooses to. Because there is no market price, any valuation is set by a negotiated round or a third-party mark rather than by trading, which is why estimating what Fanatics is worth means running a private-company valuation from revenue and margins instead of reading a share price.

Michael Rubin is founder, chairman, and chief executive officer. He sets strategy across all three arms and, through his super-voting shares, holds the deciding vote on major corporate decisions. His control is the defining fact of the company's governance.

Senior management includes Glenn Schiffman as chief financial officer, a former investment banker whose hire was widely read as an IPO-readiness signal, and Michael Conn, a longtime Rubin lieutenant. Fanatics Betting & Gaming has operated under its own leadership team since its 2021 launch. The board is reported to include investor representatives such as Silver Lake's Greg Mondre and Insight Partners' Deven Parekh, alongside independent directors. Because Fanatics is private and does not publish a proxy statement, the full board roster and its committees are not comprehensively disclosed, so any detailed list should be treated as partly inferred rather than confirmed.

Fanatics' push into betting drew a high-profile legal fight with DraftKings. In 2024, DraftKings sued a former executive, Michael Hermalyn, after he left to run a similar role at Fanatics, alleging he took confidential information and violated a non-compete. A federal court granted a preliminary injunction limiting his work, and the First Circuit upheld it before the parties reached a confidential settlement. The dispute underscored how aggressively Fanatics recruited talent to build its sportsbook, a competitive dynamic visible across how DraftKings is owned and its rivals.

Fanatics Betting & Gaming operates in a heavily regulated industry. Every state where the Fanatics Sportsbook takes bets requires its own license, and operators face ongoing scrutiny over responsible-gaming rules, advertising, and market access. Betting also invites recurring legal challenges, including a 2026 case in which Fanatics, DraftKings, and FanDuel prevailed against claims brought under an old gambling statute. The compliance burden of running a multi-state book is exactly the kind of exposure a risk register template is built to track, and it sits alongside the broader push into legal wagering seen in prediction-market operators like how Kalshi makes money.

Because Fanatics does not file audited financials, outsiders rely on company statements and reporting for revenue, segment splits, and the exact distribution of shares. This opacity is legal and common among large private firms, but it makes independent verification difficult. Reported revenue and valuation figures vary by source and date, and none carry the reliability of an audited public filing.

Fanatics' structure solves a specific problem: how to raise billions from powerful outside investors without ceding control of the company. By keeping super-voting shares, Rubin can accept capital from Clearlake, Silver Lake, SoftBank, and others while retaining the deciding vote on strategy and timing. That is what has let him move Fanatics from merchandise into trading cards and betting on his own schedule rather than an investor's.

For the leagues and unions on the cap table, ownership aligns their interests with Fanatics' growth. The same bodies that license merchandise and trading-card rights to Fanatics also profit when the company does well, which helps lock in the long-term deals the business depends on. It is a rare case where a supplier's customers are also its shareholders.

For institutional investors, the trade-off is clear. They own most of the economics but little of the control, and with no public listing they cannot easily exit. Their return depends on an eventual IPO or sale that Rubin controls the timing of. The gap between the December 2022 round at $31 billion, the 2024 employee tender at about $25 billion, and later third-party marks shows how much a private valuation can move without a single share trading, the way any investor weighs a betting operator's ownership against uncertain exit timing.

For customers, the structure is mostly invisible, but it shapes the company they buy from. A founder with entrenched control can make long-horizon bets, such as spending heavily to build a sportsbook from scratch, that a public company under quarterly pressure might avoid. The cost is less transparency about the company's finances and direction than a listed competitor would be required to provide.

Michael Rubin is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Fanatics. He built the modern company after retaining its assets in the 2011 eBay purchase of his GSI Commerce, and he controls it today through both a large equity stake and super-voting shares.

No. Fanatics is privately held and has never listed on a stock exchange. It has no ticker or public market cap, and Rubin has said the company is in no rush to go public. Its shares change hands only through private funding rounds and employee liquidity programs.

The original Football Fanatics store was opened in 1995 by brothers Alan and Mitchell Trager near Jacksonville, Florida. Michael Rubin built today's company after his GSI Commerce acquired Fanatics in 2011 and he kept it following eBay's purchase of GSI, a transaction that also reshaped eBay's ownership.

Michael Rubin is the largest single shareholder and holds voting control. Major institutional investors include Clearlake Capital, Silver Lake, SoftBank, Fidelity, and BlackRock. Sports leagues, players unions, and team owners together hold about 10% of the company as strategic partners.

Fanatics has raised roughly $4.9 billion across many private rounds. Its last priced round, in December 2022, set a $31 billion valuation. A 2024 employee tender ran at about $25 billion, and a late-2025 mark from a Fidelity mutual fund implied roughly $33.5 billion. No higher figure is confirmed by a priced financing, so any valuation above that range should be treated as an estimate.