On Sept. 7, 2025, clad in a gleaming white Carolina Panthers uniform top, Tetairoa McMillan stepped onto an NFL field for his first regular-season action as a pro football player. Working against the Jaguars in Jacksonville, McMillan hauled in five catches for 68 yards, beginning his path to the most prolific debut season (in terms of receiving yards) in Panthers history and, ultimately, the Offensive Rookie of the Year Award.
It might have been easy for the casual observer to miss the small patch -- bearing the word, "premiere," styled as PREM1ERE, plus the year, 2025 -- that was on McMillan's chest during those initial hours of his career. But when he saw the patch several months later embedded on a trading card, it appeared to have an effect on him.
"You could tell that he knew that was something special," said Clay Luraschi, SVP of products for Fanatics Collectibles, recalling McMillan's reaction to the card when the receiver signed it in front of an audience at this month's 2026 Topps Industry Conference.
In an interview this week, Luraschi said McMillan's response was typical of players seeing their own cards -- many of whom might be hoping to reacquire said cards as collectors.
"Every instance where I've seen it," Luraschi said, "they actually take a second with the card, they look at it, they appreciate it. But I know they have it in their sight to try and get that card back at some point."
Along with fellow 2025 rookies like Matthew Golden, Jaxson Dart and Cam Skattebo, McMillan is one of the players to have a Rookie PREM1ERE Patch Autograph card -- featuring the player's signature and embedded first-appearance uniform patch -- included in the 2025 Topps Chrome Football set. Released today, it's the first licensed Topps set to come out under an agreement between Fanatics Collectibles (which acquired Topps in 2022), the NFL and the NFL Players Association to produce licensed trading cards. Topps last produced licensed football cards in 2016.
In addition to the PREM1ERE patch program, the set includes a Gold Shield patch program, comprised of autographed cards embedded with the gold shields worn last season on the uniforms of 2024 NFL Honors winners like MVP Josh Allen and Offensive Player of the Year Saquon Barkley. The PREM1ERE and Gold Shield autograph patch-card programs are both one of one, meaning there is only one such card produced for each player.
Other inserts in the 2025 Topps Chrome Football set include Kaiju cards, illustrated in the style of the posters for Japanese monster movies, and Tecmo Super Bowl cards, showing the pixelated versions of players as they might appear in the vintage football video game. And there will be hundreds of autograph cards, hand-signed by a wide range of players, from young stars like Caleb Williams and Drake Maye (who, according to Fanatics Collectibles, had not previously signed licensed cards) to all-timers like Tom Brady, Jerry Rice and Barry Sanders. Luraschi said the goal with the set was to appeal to "all different types of collectors," including diehards and those new to the hobby.
The patch programs in particular, Luraschi said, are part of an attempt to elevate the way that Topps' relic cards, or cards that include physical memorabilia, are deployed. Going forward, Luraschi said, the hope is to "go a level deeper and tell stories and connect these pieces of jersey to specific moments.
"Like right now, a trading card, the reason why it's so impactful is because it connects you to your hero," he said. "It connects you to a moment. Now we have these pieces from the jersey that you can actually look up and figure out what day it's from and what that player did on that day. So it just adds to the storytelling piece of it … we're bringing the collector and the fan even closer to the moment than we have in the past. The more you can make that connection, the more that trading card is just going to resonate with the consumer, with the collector, with the fan."
Luraschi, who has worked with Topps products for 26 years, said the current approach with football cards is "completely different than what we were doing 10 years ago." So is the broader realm of card collecting, which has boomed in popularity. And as someone who has been in the industry for decades, Luraschi said he's "over the moon" to see the hobby "finally getting its time in the spotlight."
Including among the players themselves.
"Some of these patch programs that we've done in other areas, they've become, like, a thing for players to try and chase," he said. "They want their patch card."
A few years ago, Luraschi said, he knew of a handful of players who were also collectors. Now, he puts that number in the hundreds.
"That's the most authentic way to show how great collecting is, right?" he said. "I grew up a 49ers fan, I mean, I didn't need Joe Montana to show me that collecting was cool. But man, if Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott and Jerry Rice were collecting cards, I think it would have gone to another level for me."
