Retired NFL player Blake Martinez makes $5 million selling Pokemon cards
“Every competitor wants every chance they get to go and play,″ Martinez said Tuesday. “Any opportunity I get I’ll gladly take. There’s obviously a process to it. I feel like if you went to anyone and said, ‘Hey, you want to play on Thursday Night Football?’ They’d be, ‘Hell, yeah!’ No matter who it is.″
Linebacker Blake Martinez puts Pokemon trading card business on hold, returns to NFL with Panthers
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Blake Martinez has put his embattled Pokemon trading card business on hold and is returning to the NFL.
The 29-year-old linebacker has joined the Carolina Panthers practice squad and the team is hoping he can help offer some stability to a position that has been ravaged by injuries.
The Panthers (1-7) play the Chicago Bears on Thursday night, although coach Frank Reich said he’s unsure if that will be enough time for Martinez to get up to speed given that he’s only participated in one practice.
Martinez has been out of football since last November when he abruptly announced his retirement from the Las Vegas Raiders to focus on “family and future passions.”
One of those passions included Pokemon cards.
In 2022 he started “Blake’s Breaks,” a company which buys and sells Pokemon cards and reportedly did $8.3 million in revenue in just nine months, according to a CNBC report. One of his rare Pokemon cards was sold for $672,000.
But his company’s reputation took a major hit in August when it was permanently removed from Whatnot — an online social marketplace that allows users to sell products to each other — after being accused of scamming buyers.
“We really appreciate the community’s commitment to reporting trust and safety issues,” Whatnot posted on Twitter . “Our priority is ensuring a fair and honest experience for customers and upholding our community guidelines. After a comprehensive investigation into Blakesbreaks’ operations we have decided to permanently remove the seller from our platform, including the individual employees involved in misconduct.”
Martinez defended his company, saying there are “a lot of things out there that aren’t true” and “a lot of false claims.”
Regardless, he has put Blake’s Breaks on hold while working internally to fix issues within the company.
“There is a lot more due diligence in the things that I was doing, the process that I was going through and the people that I was bringing on just to make sure those things didn’t happen,” Martinez said.
For now, his focus is back on football.
A fourth-round pick by the Green Bay Packers in 2016, Martinez had four straight productive seasons with at least 144 tackles from 2017-2020 before suffering a torn ACL in 2021 while playing for his second team, the New York Giants.
He played only four games last season for the Raiders before announcing his retirement.
He doesn’t regret the decision to leave the NFL, saying that the Raiders deserved a 100% commitment that he couldn’t give at that time. But after some time away from the game, he was thrilled when the Panthers asked him to come in for a workout.
“Every competitor wants every chance they get to go and play,″ Martinez said Tuesday. “Any opportunity I get I’ll gladly take. There’s obviously a process to it. I feel like if you went to anyone and said, ‘Hey, you want to play on Thursday Night Football?’ They’d be, ‘Hell, yeah!’ No matter who it is.″
Retired NFL player Blake Martinez makes $5 million selling Pokemon cards
ES
Blake Martinez earned $28.5 million across his seven seasons as a professional player in the NFL. He retired in November 2022 to focus fully on the business he launched back in July.
In these seven months, his new professional activity has generated $5 million in income.
All thanks to his love for Pokemon cards. Martinez plied his trade at the Green Bay Packers between 2016 and 2019 before moving to the New York Giants (2020/21).
Then, he joined the Las Vegas Raiders, where he retired just two weeks after selling a Pikachu card for $670,000. He played 84 games and led the NFL in tackles with 144 in 2017. He averaged 148.6 tackles between 2017 and 2020.
He began selling his Pokemon cards as he spotted the opportunity in the market. By the time he began, he had already signed a three-year, $30 million contract with the Giants.
In 2021 he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee and remained sidelined until September 2022.
After being released by the Giants, Martinez signed with the Raiders, but he already had his mind set on retiring to devote more time to selling cards through his company Blake’s Breaks.
“I think there’s more to my success than [my name],” Martinez told CNBC Make It.
“I used to be like the quarterback of the defense, I was calling plays. When I started this business, it felt like running a team again.
“Every single day when I wake up, my shoulder doesn’t hurt and my back doesn’t hurt anymore.
“When all that hurts are my fingers from opening, like, 1,000 packs of cards per day, I think, ‘I’m going to keep doing this.'”
In the last seven months, he has reportedly generated more than $5 million in revenue through the collectibles resale platform Whatnot.
A quarter of the revenue goes back into the business, as Martinez revealed, while the rest goes to him and the company’s 15 contracted employees.
Martinez started collecting Pokemon cards when he was six years old. His $15 weekly paycheck was used to buy envelopes and he had more than 1,000 cards in an album that he played with his friends.
As time went by, his mother decided to give away the album that was forgotten somewhere at home.
When he noticed that Pokemon cards where sold for thousands of dollars during the Covid-19 pandemic, he decided to invest by buying numerous boxes which he would open to auction the cards through Whatnot.
Martinez gradually made a lot of money and, once he retired, he set up Blake’s Breaks. He has branches in Miami and Denver, and will open another one in New Jersey soon.
He wants to open two more in Canada and the UK, as Martinez hopes to reach 10 million in annual revenues and also incorporate the sale of comics, a step prior to adding to his catalog all kinds of products sold on the Whatnot platform.
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