Auston Matthews and Henrik Lundqvist are part of an elite guest list featuring sporting legends who will be in New York City this weekend for a first-of-its-kind show for fans, collectors and athletes.
Fanatics Fest NYC, a concept conceived, developed and operated by Fanatics, the multibillion dollar global sports distribution giant and NHL partner, will run from Friday through Sunday at the Javits Center.
"It's really, truly an immersive sports festival," said Lance Fensterman, the chief executive officer of Fanatics Events.
Matthews, the Toronto Maple Leafs center who was named captain Wednesday, was there Friday for photo ops and autographs.
Lundqvist will be there Sunday, joined by fellow former New York Rangers goalie Mike Richter, and current Rangers defenseman K'Andre Miller and forward Matt Rempe. They will participate in a "No Quit New York" panel discussion that will be hosted by former Rangers forward Tie Domi.
Lundqvist, Richter, Miller and Rempe will also be doing photo ops and signing autographs.
New York Islanders goalie Ilya Sorokin will be in attendance Sunday for photo ops and autographs.
Other A-listers at Fanatics Fest include Derek Jeter (Friday), Tom Brady (Friday), Eli Manning (Friday), David Ortiz (Friday), Julius Erving (Friday), Rob Gronkowski (Friday), Kevin Durant (Saturday), Barry Sanders (Saturday), Michael Strahan (Saturday), Jerry Rice (Saturday), Lawrence Taylor (Saturday), Cal Ripken Jr. (Saturday), Peyton Manning (Sunday), Mike Tyson (Sunday) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (all three days).
"In sports, nothing like this exists," Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin said on "CBS Mornings" on Monday. "When I went to Comic Con I'm like, 'We need this for sports.' That's when we said we're going to build it, we're going to bring everybody out, and we've got this coming weekend 200 of the best athletes, artists, celebrities in the world coming together to launch fanatics fest at Javits."
In addition to autographs and photo ops, many of the athletes will be participating in interactive events with kids and various in-depth Q&As and panel discussions like the one that will feature Lundqvist, Rempe, Miller, Richter and Domi on Sunday.
"There's a huge presence for cards and collectibles; it'll be the largest card show that has ever happened in New York City," Fensterman said. "But then there is everything else. There will be about 50-60 panels with athletes in conversation, podcasts that will be recording live, an entire stage dedicated to just learning about card, hobby, memorabilia collecting, and we'll have the entire show floor filled with activations just like what the NHL is doing. All of the leagues will be there with memorabilia displays, interactive features. There will be autograph and photo ops with probably 200 athletes that are there appearing, signing.
"It's this idea of saying, ‘Let's take all of the things about collecting memorabilia in sports that people love and bring it together in one place to let people celebrate their fandom.’"
In addition to the players on the guest list, the NHL will have an 8,800-square-foot activation booth for fans on the main floor at Fanatics Fest featuring the NHL shield and logos for all 32 teams.
The League will have memorabilia cases featuring Hall of Fame artifacts. There will be a virtual reality game, the accuracy shooting challenge with targets in the four corners of the net and the washer/dryer shooting game.
"You'll see Fan Fests, like the NHL threw an awesome one [at All-Star Weekend] in Toronto that we went to, but that's for a singular sport," Fensterman said. "The idea of saying, 'Let's do multisport, immersive, interactive, cards, collectibles, content all in one spot,' it's pretty novel. It was born out of this idea that most major fan-focused spaces have at least one unifying event. It's Comic Con for popular culture, South by Southwest for film, music and television, Coachella for music and influencers, CES for technology.
“There are all these huge platforms where the entire industry gathers and fans can celebrate what they love and interact with the creators they love, brands are there making announcements and activating. Every industry has one, but sports doesn't, so we thought maybe it was time and Fanatics was willing to make the investment to say, ‘Let's try it.’"
Fensterman said it wasn't too much of a reach for Fanatics to create the event because it can leverage its relationships with many of the top athletes and its other business ventures.
Assets from Topps, Mitchell & Ness and Lids, a Fanatics-owned companies, will all be featured at Fanatics Fest.
"You realize that we didn't have to go too far out of our own building to create something pretty interesting and then by forging more relationships beyond the building we could make it even richer and better," Fensterman said. "We're taking a big swing here, and I think it's going to be an exciting offering for fans that hopefully helps them celebrate even deeper what they love and discover some new things about sports fandom that they love."
Fensterman said the panel discussions and 1-on-1 live interviews will help fans and athletes connect and create engagement that can't be discovered in a simple autograph or photo-op setting.
"One key thing about events like this is they're really good for building deep relationships and telling stories," Fensterman said. "The format of a live event lends itself to that. It also is really ideal for discovery, so I came to see blank and found out I'm really in love with blank. I worked in big pop culture events for a long time and we saw that in Comic Con.
“There aren't that many people that wake up and say, ‘I want to dress up as a superhero,’ but when you go to a show and you're there because you wanted to buy a comic book or get a Funko Pop, whatever your thing is, and then you see people all in costume, you may think, 'That's pretty rad, let's do that.' So, there's discovery, cross-pollination that is really neat about immersive live events like this."
