At sixteen, Michael Rubin owed his creditors about $120,000. He was a high-school kid in suburban Philadelphia who had started tuning skis in his parents' basement at twelve and, at fourteen, opened a shop in Conshohocken called Mike's Ski and Sport. The seed money was $2,500 in bar mitzvah gifts, and the lease had to be signed by his father. The shop grew into five.
Then the debts arrived. His father lent him $37,000, on one condition: that he go to college. Rubin enrolled at Villanova and lasted one semester. In that time he found a deal, buying $200,000 in overstock sports equipment for $17,000 a friend lent him and reselling it for $75,000. He left school to chase more of the same.
eBay bought GSI for $2.4 billion, but what it really wanted was the fulfilment business.
He was born in Philadelphia in 1972, to a psychiatrist mother and a veterinarian father. His next company, KPR Sports, was named after his parents' initials. It sold closeout athletic gear and reached $1 million in sales in 1993 and $50 million by 1995. In 1998 he created Global Sports Incorporated, which became GSI Commerce, the engine that ran online stores for other brands.
Fanatics itself is older than Rubin's claim to it. Brothers Alan and Mitchell Trager opened Football Fanatics in the Orange Park Mall in Jacksonville in 1995, selling Jaguars gear. It moved online and was later absorbed into GSI. Reference works date the company to 2011, when Rubin took it over, and the sources do not agree on a single founding year.
The turn came in 2011. eBay bought GSI for $2.4 billion, but what it really wanted was the fulfilment business. Rubin bought back the consumer sports businesses, Fanatics among them, at a bargain price. A $150 million round from Insight Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz followed in 2012, then Silver Lake and SoftBank.
Growth has had friction. Panini sued in 2023, alleging anti-competitive behaviour. MLB jerseys drew fan fury in 2024. In the pandemic the company made over a million masks and gowns from jersey fabric. It first meant to launch trading cards without inventory, then bought Topps in December 2021 after that company's SPAC deal fell through.
By December 2022 Fanatics was valued at $31 billion. It opened the first retail sportsbook inside an NFL stadium in January 2023 and, in 2026, won an exclusive FIFA collectibles deal starting in 2031. One report puts 2025 revenue near $13 billion, though sources disagree on whether that is actual or target.
A first-time founder can take one thing from the ski shop. Rubin's earliest mistake, borrowing more than he could repay at sixteen, taught him to hunt for the deal that pays the debt. And the company he is known for was assembled from pieces he sold and bought back.