Less than two years after launching with Major League Baseball, Topps’ debut patch program will expand to its third sport for future WWE WrestleMania, RAW and Smackdown events.
Starting with WrestleMania 41 on Saturday and Sunday, all superstars will wear special patches commemorating the event on their boots, which will later be removed and placed into one-of-one autographed trading cards.
Superstars will be able to wear a WrestleMania Patch each year they participate — rather than for just their debut — with each patch distinguishable by that event’s logo.
Beginning with RAW next Monday, all superstar wrestlers making their first main-roster appearance at a RAW or Smackdown event will wear a Main Roster Debut Patch. Like debut patches worn in MLB and MLS, these will be worn only once.
According to Fanatics, the cards will feature an authentication hologram as well as the date and name of the featured event.
The addition of WWE events is the latest update to the debut patch program, which first launched as part of 2023 Topps Chrome Update Baseball.
Topps and Fanatics expanded the program to include MLS last year with 2024 Topps MLS Chrome and have now added WWE, which has become one of the fastest growing sports among card collectors during the ultra-modern era.
Fanatics Collectibles has yet to announce which product or products the one-of-kind WWE patches will appear in, but the debut patch program, as a whole, has been among the company’s most successful innovations to date.
Record-breaking sales so far have been highlighted by the recent $1.1 million sale of the patch worn by Pittsburgh Pirates superstar Paul Skenes in Fanatics Collect’s March Premier Auction.
According to Fanatics Collectibles SVP of product Clay Luraschi, the most recent challenge has been expanding the program without going too far.
“We want to be smart about how we lay these plans out,” Luraschi told cllct. “You don’t want to overdo it, and you don’t want to underdo it, either. The beauty of it is that [debut patches] are all one-of-one cards, but they all have a special story to tell, so they’re all very meaningful in their own way.”
The spirit of the patch and its storytelling is the same as those from MLB and MLS, but WWE patches present a unique logistical challenge Topps hasn’t faced yet.
For MLB and MLS debuts, patches are affixed to the player’s jersey and later removed, authenticated and placed into trading cards.
Wrestlers aren’t wearing jerseys like professional baseball or soccer players, and there certainly aren’t as many sleeves to utilize.
Professional wrestling, by nature, is a physical sport, and that forced Topps and Fanatics to find a solution that kept the patch safely affixed to the wrestler while still being visible to the fan and collector.
In the end, Topps and Fanatics landed on the boot — or sneaker, in John Cena’s case.
The success of the debut patch has helped convince leagues to buy into the program, but a strong relationship is still required to coordinate getting the patch onto every wrestler’s footwear before they hit the ring.
Luckily for Topps, the relationship with WWE is likely as strong as ever.
“They’re all into the trading card space, and you can see how they’ve supported it,” Luraschi said. “I mean, they’re talking about trading cards all the time — whether it’s on an aired event or on social media, they’re really supporting the products, and it’s fantastic. So they’re all in, we’re all in.”
The introduction of the WrestleMania Patch and Main Roster Debut Patch arrives as Fanatics Collectibles pushes heavily into the category, which has quickly become a favorite among collectors.
In January, the company secured a long-term deal with WWE to score a massive brand while also stealing away a key product line from trading card competitor Panini America. Panini had held the rights for WWE since 2022.
The first release under that new deal, 2025 Topps Chrome WWE had an immediate impact on wrestling collectors and featured the first autographs of The Rock in a licensed product since 1998.
To date, the highest public sale from the set, according to data tool Card Ladder, is the $15,860 paid for the 2025 Topps Chrome WWE The Rock Retrospective Autographs Superfractor 1/1 PSA 9 at Goldin in March.
Three weeks prior to that sale, another The Rock Superfractor 1/1 fetched $9,500 on eBay.
After first selling for $160 directly from Topps, hobby boxes of 2025 Topps Chrome WWE are now trending closer to $430 on the secondary market, according to data tool Waxstat.
“We don’t want to take our foot off the pedal, we want to continue to build on what we saw with Chrome,” Luraschi said. “The response from consumers and fans was incredible, and we want to continue to build, because we truly feel like this is an area of the trading card business that is still untapped.”
The introduction of one-of-a-kind WWE patches should also provide a boost to a high-end wrestling market that has largely been dominated by autographs and super short-printed parallels.
High-end wrestling sets have featured memorabilia before, but the addition of pieces tied to specific moments — something Topps has made an extreme priority in recent months with new Logoman cards and even dedicated high-end sets — should elevate the category.
WWE is already known for manufacturing iconic moments in the ring, and Topps now believes it has another tool to translate those images into wrestling’s ultimate trading card.
“Storytelling is in their blood as a company. It perfectly matches our goals and objectives for the trading card business,” Luraschi said. “That’s telling those stories, getting into what individual cards mean — where is that patch from, when was that autograph signed? Going a layer deeper, going deeper than just having a 2.5-by-3.5-inch piece of cardboard in your hand.”
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture. He was previously the Collectibles Editor at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on X and Instagram @benmburrows.