Blake Martinez has made $11.5 million selling Pokémon cards since NFL retirement

Blake Martinez was burned out on football and it took a rare Pokémon card to convince him to quit the game and embrace the collectibles.

Martinez is the former Stanford star who started at linebacker for four straight years with the Packers. He signed a $30 million free agent deal with the Giants in March 2020, right when the Covid pandemic was shutting down sports across the world. Then he tore his ACL early in the 2021 season, which led to his eventual release from the Giants. And in 2022, he signed with the Raiders, coming back from the knee injury to play dominating defense.

But Blake Martinez didn’t want to go through the grind anymore. Besides, he’d just sold a pristine Pikachu Illustrator for $672,000. Since he became a full-time Pokémon businessman, his company has generated $11.5 million in revenues.

“I just asked myself, do I want to keep starting over from ground zero with football, and keep destroying my body,” Blake Martinez told The Athletic. “Or do I want to start over from ground zero here, and do something I can actually sustain for a long time?

“I loved football. But what I found out was I loved building and running my own team even more.”

Blake Martinez tapped in big to a huge collectible market

Martinez called his company Blake’s Breaks. He’s hired 20 full-time employees and they do 16 hours of live streaming a day on Whatnot. If you’re not into the collectible scene, Whatnot bills itself as a giant community marketplace. It did nearly $1 billion in business last year. Vendors conduct hours of live auctions to buy and sell collectibles like Pokémon cards. Martinez still hosts several live shows per week.

Pokémon started in Japan in the late 1990s and with $76.2 billion, it’s the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. It’s more than $20 billion ahead of Mickey Mouse and Friends and Star Wars.

Long before he played football, Blake Martinez was like so many other kids who collected Pokémon cards. Growing up in Arizona, he’d buy a pack of cards for 99 cents. When he went off to play football for Stanford, he left his binder with his parents. Once he was in the NFL, he started reading about the amount of money people paid for a regular card. He thought he’d cash in with his collection. Instead, his mother told him she’d given away the cards long ago.

Martinez used $40,000 of his NFL earnings to buy cards on eBay. Then he began messaging collectors via Instagram. It took awhile, but the collectors eventually accepted him as one of their own. He started his company a year ago this month. A month later, he received a tip about a rare card that eventually led to the $672,000 windfall.

Craig Jones, a Whatnot GM, talked up Blake Martinez in an interview with The Athletic.

“He’s an incredible talent building a million-dollar business,” Jones said of Martinez. “Blake brings the same level of hype he had sacking a quarterback when he pulls a Charizard from a pack.”