The college sports landscape shifted dramatically with the arrival of name, image and likeness rights four years ago.
For decades, student athletes were considered amateurs and were barred from earning money while colleges reaped the financial rewards. That all changed when NIL went into effect, opening the door for athletes to profit from their likenesses.
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That has even created new roads in the trading card space.
Panini America has leaned heavily into NIL with plans to keep expanding.
“It’s been really interesting. The impact in being able to collect a player earlier is super appealing,” said Jason Howarth, senior vice president of marketing and athlete relations for Panini America.
“There were those guys that you traditionally had to wait for another three or four years to come into the fold from a collecting point of view,” Howarth said. “Now you have the ability to access those players and collect those cards almost immediately from the moment they step on the field, whether that’s via Panini Instant or in our core products.”
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The NIL landscape was chaotic when it first started. There weren’t enough rules in place and everyone was learning along the way.
“It came into play in 2021 only to quickly realize that there were no guardrails, so it became very crazy,” Howorth said. “I think there’s been lots of learnings on a number of different fronts, but it really created a dynamic where you are able to now collect the best players in college while they’re in college. But it is a very dynamic marketplace that’s very fluid just because of everything that’s going on in the space from an NIL point of view.”
Some of the early learnings included dealing with different regulations within all 50 states. No rules were the same from one state to the next.
Then, the NCAA portal also created a challenge, seeing just how many student athletes change schools every year. With production timelines on traditional trading card products often taking more than six months, players moving teams can wreak havoc on plans.
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Lastly, working with young student athletes posed its own set of issues.
“Talking to players earlier in their understanding of the process, and not necessarily always having advisers in the process, I think it has changed the dynamic a little bit,” Howarth said. “A lot of them don’t have a lot of experience in the process and so trying to educate them with that experience in addition to doing a trading card deal is just an added element.”
Panini is expanding its NIL partnerships. It has worked with UConn to create men’s and women’s basketball products — which came at the perfect time with the women’s team winning the national championship in 2025.
It has an exclusive deal with Texas’ quarterback Arch Manning, which allowed Panini to get him into an NFL product like Score Football this year.
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The company also launched Panini College, a dedicated NIL platform that allows athletes at partner universities to have their own Panini trading card.
Panini is now expanding to launch an Ohio State trading card box set, the company announced on Tuesday. It will include 250 cards on the checklist with football, basketball, volleyball and lacrosse stars.
The collection will be on sale at Ohio Stadium on Saturday, Aug. 30, as the defending national champions open the 2025 college football season against the University of Texas.
The Ohio State set features both current and former legendary players, including Jeremiah Smith, Caleb Downs, Carnell Tate, Archie Griffin, Eddie George, Cris Carter, Katie Smith, Michael Redd and Jaloni Cambridge.
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“We’ve got a number of other things that we’re going to be planning on launching in that NIL space specific to colleges,” Howarth said. “We’re folding players into Donruss or we’re folding players into Donruss Optic or some of the other brands like Prizm.”
With Panini’s future landscape in trading cards murky with an outstanding antitrust lawsuit against Fanatics, the Texas-based company has aggressively moved into this newer space.
Panini plans to take what has been successful in its other sports and apply it to the college scene.
“You’re going to get our version of the Downtown on the collegiate side on campus, which is always super cool,” Haworth said. “You’ll get to see more of that type of stuff coming into the NIL space. You’ll get all that stuff plus autographs of the guys that we believe are going to be the most collectible in the NIL space.”
This news was originally published on this post .
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