Tom Brady Explains His Aggressive Push Into Trading Cards

NEW YORK — After Tom Brady retired from the NFL, he signed a 10-year, $375 million deal to be Fox’s lead game analyst. The legendary quarterback—who made more than $330 million in his 23-year pro football career—also took ownership stakes in at least four franchises in two countries, including the NFL’s Raiders.

Perhaps most noticeably, he has amassed an enormous portfolio of endorsements. In recent years, he has done ads for Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts, Hertz, Subway, Ferrero chocolates, Ninja air fryers and Shark vacuums, Delta Airlines, Oakley, delivery service GoPuff, T-Mobile, IWC Schaffhausen watches, Webex, and Duracell. He also folded his apparel and nutrition brands Brady Brand and TB12 into Mike Repole’s NoBull, where he became a major shareholder.

One remaining business has Brady’s name in bright lights on the door: CardVault by Tom Brady. The company is expanding at a frenzied pace—if there isn’t one in your town already, there probably will be soon. 

To find out why a brick-and-mortar trading card shop is getting so much of Brady’s time and attention, Front Office Sports sat down with Brady at Fanatics Fest in New York City in July. 

“I Only Wanted Don Mattingly Cards”

Brady, who says he’s a lifelong card collector, cofounded CardVault by Tom Brady in 2024. In addition to half of the name, he owns half of the company. The company describes itself as the first “national retailer dedicated to sports cards, trading cards and collectibles.” The job combines Brady’s childhood passion with his ever-expanding business empire. 

“I always joke I wouldn’t have been as good at math as I was had I not collected a lot of baseball cards,” Brady told FOS in a recent interview. “I started off as a young kid—seven, eight years old. There was a great hobby shop in San Mateo,” the Bay Area town where Brady grew up. “I got an incredible collection. I got a lot of old baseball cards. So, it just brings together a lot of things I believe in—human connection, trading, the excitement of finding something new, and then over time accumulating a really cool collection that is valuable to you.”

Trading card stores have been a historically fickle business. Mom-and-pop stores dominated the pre-Internet days, with some successfully adapting to the hobby’s turbulent waves while others closed. But Brady’s capital and celebrity Rolodex have helped CardVault add 14 stores since he joined the company. 

The trading card industry, thriving for much of the 20th century, grew oversaturated with excessive production by the 1990s, and hit a 21st-century slump common to many analog hobbies. But that slump was rapidly reversed during the COVID-19 pandemic, as people used the extra time to reconnect with their old collections. The industry had a market size of between $10 billion and $14 billion before the pandemic and reached $50 billion this year, according to the New York Post. 

Card Ladder, an app that tracks digital card sales, recently announced, sports card sales in May were $676 million, a 10% increase from April. The number climbed to $695 million in June.  

CardVault is capitalizing on the hobby’s white-hot moment while tapping into the celebrity participation it lacked in its previous life. While some independent shops have expanded to multiple stores, CardVault is multiplying like a Starbucks, with plans to reach triple digits in the near future.

“They’re finding ways to leverage their Fanatics connections, their industry connections, their player and promotion marketing connections to make more of an entertainment type experience,” Khalid Ballouli, a sports business professor at the University of South Carolina, told FOS of CardVault.

When Brady first joined the business, Chris Costa, one of CardVault’s cofounders, was skeptical about how involved the seven-time Super Bowl champion would be. But Costa said he and Brady talk daily and that the 48-year-old’s “involvement is way beyond what I expected.”

Brady is a true hobbyist. Since retiring, Brady has been a regular at The National Sports Collectors Convention as well as auctions for high-end cards. He recently bought a rare autographed rookie card of Raiders quarterback Fernando Mendoza.

At Fanatics Fest last month, Brady eagerly introduced himself to Phillies manager Don Mattingly, who starred for the Yankees when Brady was a kid. 

“Since I was seven years old, I only wanted Don Mattingly cards,” Brady told Mattingly. “The front of my binder was you. All the pages, the laminated pages, the plastic, were Don Mattingly cards.”

“That’s amazing,” Mattingly replied. 

From Nantucket to Boardrooms

The first version of CardVault was founded while Brady was still playing. Costa grew up in New England and played college baseball at Bryant in Rhode Island. He collected as a child, but got pulled back into the hobby with “box breaks,” which allow customers to pay for a “spot” for a specific team or player that are pulled from a box of cards. (Coincidentally, Costa had a reputation for being a big dealer in Brady’s rookie cards.) 

In 2020, Costa ran into his longtime friend Randy Greenstein on a Nantucket beach. Greenstein’s hospitality company Big Night was struggling due to the pandemic, while Costa’s card business was thriving. They decided to launch CardVault, pairing Costa’s box breaks and card selling with Big Night’s video production and marketing teams, offering cards, box breaks and grading submissions before going into retail. Their first trading card store opened in Gillette Stadium in October 2021, followed by Connecticut and Boston. At the time of the store’s launch, Brady was playing his penultimate season with the Buccaneers. 

CardVault’s original business gave Costa and Greenstein a relationship with Fanatics founder Michael Rubin, whose company bought Topps in 2022. CardVault, like most trading card companies, buys many of its products directly from Topps. Rubin and Brady are close friends and business partners, and in July 2024 at The National Sports Collectors Convention in Cleveland, Rubin pitched Costa on opening a store with Brady. When CardVault pitched Brady’s team on a store, Brady affirmed his interest but wanted to think bigger. 

“I don’t want to do a store,” Brady told Costa. “I want to open all of them with you guys.”

After joining forces, the two sides went back and forth on a name for their new-look partnership. Costa told FOS they toyed with everything from ‘Tom Brady’s CardVault’ and ‘Brady’s Vault’ before combining the original name with Brady’s. Costa liked the idea of marrying Brady’s reputation of being “laser-focused” with the company’s nationwide ambitions. Brady told FOS that he agreed to have his name on the business because he thought it would bring brand awareness to the company and bolster credibility. “My signature is on it and I’m behind it,” Brady said of his reasoning.

“We feel like everything we’re doing as a company is kind of relayed in having his name on the brand,” Costa said.

Going National

Next week, CardVault will open its 17th store in Palo Alto, Calif., and has plans to open six more by 2027. Costa said the company plans to have 40 stores open by 2028 as it pushes toward 100. Costa told FOS that every store is profitable to date and offers Pokémon and other trading card products in addition to sports cards, memorabilia and card grading. A company spokesman said CardVault has seen a 400% growth in revenue from 2025 to 2026. 

Both Brady and Costa told FOS that the company is targeting areas with high foot traffic such as enormous malls like the American Dream Mall in New Jersey or various stadiums and ballparks across the country.

“When we looked at our industry, we identified a gap,” Costa told FOS. “Our industry was severely lacking in what we thought was the next generation of the hobby shop. There was an opportunity and a window for a true retail experience that was a little bit elevated, a little bit streamlined, a little bit tech savvy to come in and build an experience that really didn’t exist.”

Brady said he leaves the retail part of the business to Costa and his team, and channeled his inner Bill Belichick when discussing his role with the company. 

“It’s like a great football team,” Brady told FOS. “There’s a great saying we had in New England, ‘do your job’, and they’re really good at the operations and understanding the logistics around the business. And then I get to play my role, which is to be a great ambassador for the brand and bring awareness to what we’re doing and continue to enhance my collection and make the fan experience great.” 

Brady’s role is beyond brand awareness. Costa said Brady recently worked the phones to improve CardVault’s allocation of Pokémon cards, which are among the store’s top sellers. Brady regularly attends CardVault store openings across the country and occasionally brings his childhood binder, still chock full of Mattingly cards.  

“People save up a lot of money to come in here like I did when I was a kid,” Brady told FOS “And this is the one thing they really look forward to. I always talk to the team before I go in and say, ‘Guys, it’s not about us, it’s about the people that are coming in here. How do we serve them and make their experience great?’”

Brady will continue to grow CardVault while balancing his other gigs and endorsements. But while his portfolio expands, the trading card company will remain a unique part of it as it continues to carry his name. 

“Things have come full circle for me,” Brady said. “I get to see new collectors have that same joy, hunting down the players they love, the teams they love, and really getting engaged with these players and being a part of it.”