[packs]

Originally Posted by BobC

Off Yahoo I believe. Just type into your web browser "Topps loses baseball card license", and hit search. You should find plenty of articles. One in particular by Andy Esposito of NYSportsDay included quotes from Andy Redman, Topps Executive Chairman, who states they were just informed the license had been given to someone else. Topps didn't even know negotiations had been going on with Fanatics.

And the stories saying Fanatics is paying 10X more than Topps ever paid need to be taken with a big grain of salt. It isn't a perfect analogy, but think of a business owner who also separately owns the building his business is in. He's basically paying himself rent so he can make the rent whatever he wants, even multiple times what a fair market rent would be. All he's doing is taking money out of one of his pockets and putting it into another pocket of his. He ends up with the same amount of money at the end of the day. And since MLB and the MLBPA also both own part of Fanatics, to some extent they are paying themselves licensing fees, so it is somewhat like the business owner paying himself rent. Except in this case there are going to be multiple sports leagues and player's associations involved. My guess is the new NBA and NFL licensing agreements with Fanatics may also be at multiple times what was previously being paid as licensing fees.

This can help to make it look like Topps and other sport license holders would clearly have been outbid when it came time for their license renewals, regardless of what they did. But because of the common ownership between the leagues and player associations with Fanatics, they have an unfair advantage over Topps and other independent, unrelated license holders in setting renewal licensing fee amounts. This is just the kind of thing that could result in this being taken to the courts. However, due to the size and economic wherewithal of Fanatics, the leagues and player associations, Topps and othe current licensees may not have the ability to sustain and survive a long drawn out court battle, especially if a major part of their business had ceased due to the loss of those licensing agreements. Panini is likely a different story due to their size and worldwide market in non-major US sportscards. No idea how they will end up reacting to all this.

We'll just have to wait and see what happens next. But I would guess that if this is ultimately going to result in a lawsuit(s), it will happen sooner than later while someone like Topps still has a license to produce cards for a few more years.

If you're going to take one thing with a grain of salt why not this idea that Topps didn't have an opportunity to make a play? The only comments I see on the negotiations is a Topps Exec claiming they didn't know the rights were being shopped around.