How Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, and Bobby Witt Jr. turned sports card passion into business ventures

New York Times

29-04-2025

Bobby Witt Jr. is still like every kid cracking open the doors of a local sports card shop for the first time.
'It's something that has always been a goal and dream of mine just to kind of have your own card shop,' the Kansas City Royals All-Star shortstop said.
The same can be said for Witt's childhood idols — Tom Brady and Derek Jeter.
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All three have put their desire to be a part of the business of sports cards into practice in various forms. Brady, Jeter and Witt spoke to The Athletic about their love for collecting sports cards and their continuous desire to increase their business interests within the booming hobby.
They're certainly not the only former or current athletes diving into sports cards as collectors or as business investors, either. But these two legends and one modern-day perennial MVP candidate are setting examples that could prompt others to follow.
Brady cracked open his brown padded binder covered in circular hologram stickers found in Upper Deck baseball card packs from 1989 and the following few years. Each page inside was filled with nine cards, mirroring the binders of so many children growing up in that era when Topps, Donruss, Fleer and Upper Deck flooded the market.
'I've collected the past 40 years, so I've got a pretty intense collection,' the former New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback said. 'I got really engaged in the hobby when I was a kid, and it was the only thing I ever collected, like a lot of us my age. I collected a lot of baseball cards and my mom, it was a reward when I got a good grade that she would bring me down to the hobby shop in downtown San Mateo (Calif.) to buy all the different cards that were available.
'So I kept the collection for a long time, and it was actually in my closet at my parents' (house) for a long time, and my house in the Bay Area where my parents still live. And finally when I got out of college, they shipped it all back to me and I basically kept it for the last 25 years.'
Tom Brady shows off his childhood baseball card collection… pic.twitter.com/N4pA2HqMjg
— Topps (@Topps) April 12, 2025
Brady said he owns thousands of his own cards, as well as being an avid collector of Joe Montana, Michael Jordan and numerous baseball players. 'So they're all graded and they're in a safe,' Brady said.
Even though Brady's more prominent current roles include Fox color analyst and part owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, attaching his name to a growing number of sports card stores may have been the easiest, and most enjoyable business venture he's entered post NFL retirement.
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CardVault by Tom Brady opened its fourth brick and mortar store in early April. The lofty goal for Brady and his partners will be to open one store per month with the hopes of franchises across the country.
Brady said the goal for a national and global footprint within the industry is attainable because, thanks to an expected confidence from the greatest quarterback in NFL history: 'I think we do this better than anybody in the world.'
'You know at the end of the day it's the industry, but we love sports,' Brady said. 'And we love sports that bring people together, communities together. We've been sitting in stadiums for a long time watching fans of every economic background, race, religion, come to the stadiums to cheer us on. And I think sports in our communities, it brings people together in ways nothing else can. I want everybody to be a collector.'
Even describing the vision of the company moments away from the ribbon cutting of CardVault's latest store, this one in East Rutherford, N.J., his words carried a palpable tone of inexplicability as if he were still the 10-year-old boy from San Mateo opening his own card shop. The dream before the NFL dream.
'It's all coming to life, and it's been really fun because your love of sports can be shown in a lot of different ways,' Brady said. 'And through collecting, through following certain players, obviously now with fantasy sports and so forth, there's just so many ways for us to be engaged with our heroes. And I had a lot of them when I was a kid, I collected a lot of them when I was a kid.
'Now I see myself on some of these cards here in the store, and it's still a bit surreal.'
Jeter's 'relationship' with sports cards commenced long before his prized New York Yankees rookie cards lived inside wax packs after he graduated high school in 1992. His interest for sports cards and memorabilia followed him from his youth through his Hall of Fame baseball career and became one of his bigger passions at age 50.
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'I've been a collector for years,' Jeter said. 'A lot of memorabilia. I have a lot of my own memorabilia. I had a lot of my own cards. I don't want to sound self-centered (laughs). A lot of times people send them to you. … I'm a fan of athletes in other sports. Obviously baseball, but also in other sports.'
Jeter still remains a heavy presence within Topps baseball products with his autographed cards prominently featured in sets every year. But his deepest dive into the sports card business occurred in 2022 when he helped launch Arena Club, a digital repack (individual cards from the secondary market that have been reinserted into custom packs) retailer, grading service and marketplace platform.
'The baseball card collection has really been sort of an underground industry, I think for a long time,' Jeter said. 'Even throughout my career, you'd see players that had card collections, but they didn't really openly talk about it too much. I do think over the pandemic is when the industry started to sort of shine and now it seems like it's just taken off again.'
The reason why Arena Club struck a chord for Jeter stems from a weather event that wiped away his personal collection. Arena Club stores cards on its marketplace in 'a climate controlled, high-security, disaster-proof storage vault' near Portland, Oregon.
'When I was younger, early on in my career, I used to have any baseball cards that I was on or anything that I was collecting, my parents would keep them for me at our house in Michigan,' Jeter said. 'And we had a flood and everything was ruined. These are rookie cards of mine, people that I collected growing up. It was shameful. And when Brian (Lee, co-founder and CEO of Arena Club) was explaining it to me, I was like, 'Wow, this really hits home and makes sense.''
And like Brady, the ability to buy and sell cards as a way of life transports Jeter back to being a kid spending his summers in New Jersey with family, dreaming about being Dave Winfield, one of his personal favorite players to collect.
'I'm not trying to sound silly, but it brings you back to your childhood,' Jeter said. 'I remember collecting cards and you really couldn't care less what cards you got, you were there to chew the gum and sit there and trade the cards with your friends, right? And now this is just basically taking it to another level. It sort of modernized it. And so it makes you feel like a kid. It's the same thing. It's whether you put (cards) in the spokes of your bicycle and ride around. It's an industry I think, regardless of age, you can all relate to it.'
Witt never ventures too far away from the sports card hobby. He hunts for cards on eBay. He's open to trading through an Instagram account he set up specifically to show off his collection. He's scoping out card shops whether he's in Kansas City or on an in-season road trip. And his diligence paid off during the offseason.
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The Royals shortstop hunted down his grail card: a 2000 Bowman Chrome Tom Brady rookie card with a gem mint 10 grade from PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator). The card owner wasn't letting Witt, the runner up for the 2024 American League MVP behind Aaron Judge, just walk away with it though. Witt forked over a Luka Dončić autographed one-of-one card, a Josh Allen rookie card numbered to nine and a couple other cards in a trade to acquire the Brady.
Could Witt afford to just buy the Brady card in a cash deal? It's likely not too heavy of a lift, given he's playing under an 11-year, $288 million contract with the Royals. Other PSA 10 graded Brady rookie cards have recently sold between $7,500 and $10,000, according to Card Ladder.
But for Witt, working a trade is a part of the simple reason he's so involved in the hobby: 'It's just fun!'
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'It's crazy just from the fact that you have your card collectors that have been there from the beginning and that are older now,' Witt said. 'Then you have the kids now and they collect with their parents and so just for the hobby, that's how it grows. Then you've got professional athletes that collect. You see guys in the clubhouse opening packs. You see guys doing breaks with guys so there's just so many different ways to kind of get involved in the hobby. It's just really cool how much it's growing.
'I don't see it ever really stopped growing just because of how in-tune guys are in cards and just the different variations of what a card could come in, whatever type it is. It's just cool to see it's not just one kind of genre of people that are collecting cards. There's just so many.'
Witt is so into sports cards that he even had custom, PSA-graded Topps cards made for each of his groomsmen at his wedding last year.
Coincidently, Brady and Jeter are Witt's all-time favorite athletes. Witt jumped at the chance to discuss collecting sports cards, as well as diving into the business aspect of the industry just like his childhood idols. In February, he became an investor in CollX, a digital card price guide and marketplace. He doesn't anticipate this being his last business venture in the card industry, either.
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'I just keep seeing it grow and that's what brought me into the investing side,' Witt said. 'The sky is the limit for it, and it just kind of keeps growing and growing. You get endorsement deals, this and that, but it's just something that whenever you're able to do things that you really enjoy, it just makes it a lot more fun and a lot easier and stress-free going through it all.'
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(Top photos of Brady, Jeter, and Witt:for Fanatics;for Art Miami + CONTEXT; PSA)