Fanatics Fest is expected to lose millions — again. Michael Rubin’s not worried.

“We’re still in investment mode,” the 52-year-old Fanatics CEO said of the celebrity-packed sports and culture convention, set to take place June 20 to 22 at the Javits Center.

Last year, 72,000 fans attended the inaugural festival. It was a massive success.

Sure, the company lost $15 million on the three-day celebration, but that’s a little more than a rounding error for Fanatics, which is projected to generate $12 billion in revenue in 2026.

Fanatics Fest isn’t designed to generate revenue on par with Fanatics commerce or collectible verticals, or its betting platform — it’s designed to bolster them.

“This is really about creating a sports festival that only we can create. It’s a great give back to fans,” Rubin told NYNext.

Rubin is expecting 150,000 attendees at this year’s fest. And the number of participating leagues and organizations will more than double, too. FIFA, Formula 1, the Premier League, USTA, Nike, and Dick’s Sporting Goods are joining returning partners including the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, UFC and WWE.

Then there’s the surfeit of talent who will be there.

Jay-Z is spending millions on a pop-up 40/40 Club. Tom Brady is sitting on panels and tossing footballs to fans. And Victor Wembanyama, currently traveling in China, is coming in for a cold-plunge with Kevin Hart on a live-taping of “Cold as Balls.”

Fun can also expect to see LeBron James, Travis Scott, Henrik Lundqvist, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Livvy Dunne, Kevin Costner, John Cena, Charlotte Flair and hundreds of other beloved athletes and entertainers at various autograph-signings and activations.

It will be “organized chaos,” Rubin said.

While he’s coy on specific event details, he teases “Crazy stunts, endless stunts … Twenty to 30 that no one knows about.” 

One bit he will share involves a yet-to-be-named athlete surrounded by 20 identical decoys in matching uniforms, unleashed into the crowd to confuse fans.

“We like chaos,” Rubin added.

While Fanatics Fest 1.0 was largely a hit, it wasn’t without friction. VIP badge-holders, who paid extra for their privileges, were allowed to cut lines for autographs and photos — a move Rubin now bluntly admits was a “disaster.”

“It sucked, it was terrible,” he said. “You can’t be afraid to go out and do things and make mistakes, but then you’ve got to be a great listener.”

This year, he promises that the autograph process has been overhauled and improved, as has crowd logistics, stage management and athlete transportation.

Since Rubin founded Fanatics in 2002, the sports-commerce giant has expanded from selling team merchandise to running trading cards, collectibles and its own sportsbook. The company serves more than 10 million customers annually across its stores and venue shops, and ships more than 40 million online orders a year.

The global spectator sports industry is worth more than $500 billion, but few companies have built a direct, multi-channel relationship with fans as successfully as Rubin has.

This story is part of NYNext, an indispensable insider insight into the innovations, moonshots and political chess moves that matter most to NYC’s power players (and those who aspire to be).

The idea for Fanatics Fest first came to Rubin after he attended SXSW and Comic-Con — flagship experiences that fans were annually traveling across the country and world to attend.

“I thought, ‘Why don’t we have this for sports?’” he said. “There wasn’t [anybody else] that could convene all of the sports properties and all of the athletes … We [had] to do this.”

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I test smartwatches for a living, so there’s no getting away from the fact that I use them a lot. The best smartwatches are comprehensive health, communication and personal management tools, allowing us to pay without wallets, navigate without our phones, log our workouts effectively and monitor our health 24/7.

However, as extensions of our phones, they also represent connection. I’m a big advocate of taking deliberate time away from the constant mess of screens in my life, but having a smartwatch on my wrist often means there are far fewer avenues for escape.

PALM HARBOR, Fla., June 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — CR Fitness Holdings, the nation’s fastest-growing franchisee of Crunch Fitness, is excited to announce a special one-day cyber sale for their upcoming location, Crunch Palm Harbor, FL. This $5 million state-of-the-art, brand new 55,000-square-foot fitness center, located at 35104 US Hwy 19 N in Palm Harbor.

On Saturday, June 21st, head to http://www.crunchpalmharbor.com/ for exclusive online-only membership deals. For one day only, memberships start at just $9.99 per month with $0 enrollment fees, plus savings up to $60 annually. The first 500 members to join will receive exciting perks, including a free t-shirt, discounts on personal and small group training, and more! Crunch Palm Harbor will also be hosting an in-person Cyber Sale Party from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. that same day. The event will feature food, fitness, and fun for all attendees!

Crunch Palm Harbor is a brand-new 3.0 location with a modern design that will provide a complete, upscale fitness experience with a focus on quality service. The center features top-of-the-line cardio and strength equipment including Olympic squat racks, a group fitness studio, hot studio for yoga and Pilates, pool, Cycle studio, boxing classes, performance turf, dry saunas, HydroMassage®, tanning, and the innovative HIITZone™. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned athlete, Crunch Palm Harbor accommodates a variety of fitness goals in a motivating, engaging and welcoming environment for the entire community.

“We’re so excited to bring Crunch Fitness to Palm Harbor and continue expanding in our hometown Tampa area,” said Tony Scrimale, CEO of CR Fitness Holdings. “This new location is an exciting step forward in our mission to offer high-quality, affordable fitness options to communities across the country.”

CR Fitness Holdings, LLC, led by industry veterans Vince Julien, Geoff Dyer, Tony Scrimale, and Jeff Dotson, now operates 86 Crunch Fitness locations across Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee – with plans to expand into Arizona.

About CR Fitness Holdings, LLC
CR Fitness Holdings, LLC is the leading franchisee of Crunch Fitness, and led by a management team with over 150 years of combined experience in the fitness industry. CR Fitness is on track to operate 100 locations nationwide by 2026. The company’s expansion across the U.S. reflects its commitment to providing accessible fitness experiences that combine high-quality equipment, a fun atmosphere, and exceptional value.

About Crunch Fitness
Crunch is a gym that believes in making serious exercise fun by fusing fitness and entertainment and pioneering a philosophy of ‘No Judgments.’ Crunch serves a fitness community for all kinds of people with all types of goals, exercising all different ways, working it out at the same place together. Today, we are renowned for creating one-of-a-kind group fitness classes and unique programming for our wildly diverse members. Headquartered in New York City, Crunch serves three million members with over 500 gyms worldwide in 41 states, the District of Columbia, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, and India. Crunch is rapidly expanding across the U.S. and around the globe.

Media Contact: 
Rich Merrill
SVP, Marketing – CR Fitness
[email protected]

SOURCE CR Fitness Holdings, LLC.

• People with obesity exhibit differences in walking gait, speed, energy burn and more
• Research team created an open-source, dominant-wrist algorithm specifically tuned for people with obesity
• Scientist’s exercise class with mother-in-law with obesity motivated the research

CHICAGO — For many, fitness trackers have become indispensable tools for monitoring how many calories they’ve burned in a day. But for those living with obesity, who are known to exhibit differences in walking gait, speed, energy burned and more, these devices often inaccurately measure activity — until now.

Scientists at Northwestern University have developed a new algorithm that enables smartwatches to more accurately monitor the calories burned by people with obesity during various physical activities.

The technology bridges a critical gap in fitness technology, said Nabil Alshurafa, whose Northwestern lab, HABits Lab, created and tested the open-source, dominant-wrist algorithm specifically tuned for people with obesity. It is transparent, rigorously testable and ready for other researchers to build upon. Their next step is to deploy an activity-monitoring app later this year that will be available for both iOS and Android use.

“People with obesity could gain major health insights from activity trackers, but most current devices miss the mark,” said Alshurafa, associate professor of behavioral medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Current activity-monitoring algorithms that fitness trackers use were built for people without obesity. Hip-worn trackers often misread energy burn because of gait changes and device tilt in people with higher body weight, Alshurafa said. And lastly, wrist-worn models promise better comfort, adherence and accuracy across body types, but no one has rigorously tested or calibrated them for this group, he said.

“Without a validated algorithm for wrist devices, we’re still in the dark about exactly how much activity and energy people with obesity really get each day — slowing our ability to tailor interventions and improve health outcomes,” said Alshurafa, whose team tested his lab’s algorithm against 11 state-of-the-art algorithms designed by researchers using research-grade devices and used wearable cameras to catch every moment when wrist sensors missed the mark on calorie burn.

The findings will be published June 19 in Nature Scientific Reports.

The exercise class that motivated the research

Alshurafa was motivated to create the algorithm after attending an exercise class with his mother-in-law who has obesity.

“She worked harder than anyone else, yet when we glanced at the leaderboard, her numbers barely registered,” Alshurafa said. “That moment hit me: fitness shouldn’t feel like a trap for the people who need it most.”

Algorithm rivals gold-standard methods

By using data from commercial fitness trackers, the new model rivals gold-standard methods of measuring energy burn and can estimate how much energy someone with obesity is using every minute, achieving over 95% accuracy in real-world situations. This advancement makes it easier for more people with obesity to track their daily activities and energy use, Alshurafa said.

How the study measured energy burn

In one group, 27 study participants wore a fitness tracker and metabolic cart — a mask that measures the volume of oxygen the wearer inhales and the volume of carbon dioxide the wearer exhales to calculate their energy burn (in kilocalories/kCals) and resting metabolic rate. The study participants went through a set of physical activities to measure their energy burn during each task. The scientists then looked at the fitness tracker results to see how they compared to the metabolic cart results.

In another group, 25 study participants wore a fitness tracker and body camera while just living their lives. The body camera allowed the scientists to visually confirm when the algorithm over- or under-estimated kCals.

At times, Alshurafa said he would challenge study participants to do as many pushups as they could in five minutes.

“Many couldn’t drop to the floor, but each one crushed wall-pushups, their arms shaking with effort,” he said, “We celebrate ‘standard’ workouts as the ultimate test, but those standards leave out so many people. These experiences showed me we must rethink how gyms, trackers and exercise programs measure success — so no one’s hard work goes unseen.”

The study is titled, “Developing and comparing a new BMI inclusive energy burn algorithm on wrist-worn wearables.”

Other Northwestern authors include lead author Boyang Wei, and Christopher Romano and Bonnie Nolan. This work also was done in collaboration with Mahdi Pedram and Whitney A. Morelli, formerly of Northwestern.

Funding for the study was provided by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (grants K25DK113242-01A1 and R01DK129843-01), the National Science Foundation (grant 1915847), the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (grant R21EB030305-01) and the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (grant UL1TR001422).