Tom Brady attends Fanatics and Topps ‘Hobby Rip Night’ Event with Michael Rubin, Tom Brady, Kevin Hart and Travis Scott on September 30, 2023 in Linwood, Recent Jersey.
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Because the Recent York Comic-Con launched in 2006, the convention has evolved well beyond comics into a wide-ranging fandom celebration of anime, video games, television, movies and all things popular culture, drawing greater than 200,000 attendees last 12 months.
Now, Fanatics wants to do the identical thing but for sports, hosting a three-day event in Recent York City in August that’s aiming be at the middle of sports fandom, culture and collecting.
Lance Fensterman, CEO of Fanatics Events and the previous president of ReedPop — where he produced popular culture events like Recent York Comic-Con, Complex-Con, and Star Wars Celebration — said he sees several parallels between popular culture fans and sports fans. Nonetheless, he noted, while events like Recent York Comic-Con have evolved to embrace multiple difference fanbases and communities, the sports-focused event space is “ready to be disrupted a bit.”
“You’ve collector shows and card shows, and there are 1000’s of those across the U.S., they usually’re awesome for collectors. You furthermore mght have league- and team-sponsored fan fests which are very specific for that sport or team,” Fensterman said. “What we’re trying to do is mix the most effective elements of all of that, after which culture and entertainment.”
The three-day event, called Fanatics Fest NYC, will probably be held at Recent York City’s Javits Center, the huge expo center that has hosted the Recent York Comic-Con, the Recent York International Auto Show, and other big conventions and events. The event will feature multiple stages and theatres, interactive features and games, merchandise and trading card areas, and a museum display of rare cards and sports memorabilia. Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, Eli and Peyton Manning, Kevin Durant, Sabrina Ionescu and Hulk Hogan are just a few of the large sports names scheduled to appear, Fensterman said.
The event can even look to transcend sports, integrating entrepreneurs, entertainers and cultural influencers into the programming, Fensterman said, providing a platform to discuss how sports function a platform for inspiration. There will probably be exclusive apparel collaborations and a variety of unique products from the a whole lot of teams and leagues which are Fanatics partners, which incorporates nearly every U.S. skilled sports entity reminiscent of the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, UFC, and WWE.
“Those are the moments that we get enthusiastic about, and we just don’t see it being done anywhere else on the earth of live sports events,” Fensterman said.
Fanatics Events, which was 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 WWE’s premier event in Philadelphia. The festival was the highest-grossing and most-attended fan event in WWE history, according to Fanatics.
Fanatics Events’ WWE World at WrestleMania, a five-day festival that ran alongside WWE’s premier event in Philadelphia.
With this broader sports effort, the Fanatics Fest NYC will help the Fanatics Events team pursue coinciding business goals: elevating the opposite Fanatics vertical businesses and creating a recent business around sports events.
Tickets for the event will range from $20 to $400, and general admission adult tickets will probably be priced at $50 per day. Fensterman said his goal is to draw between 50,000 and 100,000 fans for this inaugural event, which could potentially spawn other smaller-scale events across the country. The corporate can even look to host events in international markets, aiding its league partners looking to build fanbases abroad, he said.
These recent set of events can even help to fuel the opposite business lines of the corporate: its commerce and merchandise division, its collectibles and trading cards business, its livestream shopping business, and its sports betting division.
Fanatics, the three-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company which ranked No. 21 in 2022, has evolved beyond the merchandise roots that Michael Rubin founded the corporate on. The corporate’s quick ascension has helped it garner a greater than $31 billion valuation and put it on a path for a likely IPO. It has also put a magnifying glass on the corporate’s moves. The corporate says it was incorrectly blamed for issues related to Major League Baseball jerseys this spring, while it also finds itself in a legal battle with DraftKings over its expansion into sports betting.
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