Blake Martinez Seems To Have Settled Into Retirement Nicely After Making A Cool $5 MILLION Collecting Pokemon Cards Over The Last 7 Months

John Minchillo. Shutterstock Images.

CNBC- Before he left football to sell Pokémon cards, ex-NFL linebacker Blake Martinez made millions tackling people.

Over the course of his six-year professional career, Martinez amassed more than $28 million in earnings, even co-leading the league in tackles in 2017. Then, in 2021, he tore his ACL and was released from the New York Giants a year later.

While rehabbing, he found himself focusing more and more on the side hustle he picked up during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. And this past fall, when it came time to decide whether to fight for a spot on a new team — in his case, the Las Vegas Raiders — or double down on selling Pokémon cards, he made a surprising decision.

He chose the cards, launching his company Blake’s Breaks in July 2022 and committing to it full-time in November. Over the past seven months, it’s brought in more than $5 million in revenue on collectible reselling platform Whatnot, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

A quarter of that revenue gets reinvested back into Blake’s Breaks, Martinez says. The rest is take-home pay for himself and his 15 contract employees.

Goddammit man. I can live with missing out on the millions of dollars professional athletes make because I'm not fast, strong, or the slightest bit in shape. But seeing Blake Martinez make roughly 20% of his career NFL earnings in half a year simply trying to catch'em all hurts me to the core of my soul.

I've never been a Pokemon guy because it got big slightly before my time. But I spent an absurd amount of money from allowances, birthdays, and however the hell else you get money as a kid on sports cards, comic book cards, and even motherfucking POGS. Yeah that's right. While kids were spending the $20 bills their grandparents gave them on items that gave them beautiful instant gratification like CDs and candy, I was investing in my future by going hard in the Pogs market like Milhouse.

So seeing someone else make bank in an industry my body and way of living is made to thrive in hurts. Doubly so since I'm pretty sure Blake, Pikachu, and Squirtle would've made up a better linebacking corps than the Giants had at the end of last season. Nonetheless, I'm happy for Blake since opening packs of cards is a hell of a lot easier on the body than bashing skulls with superhumans 4+ months a year, even though highlights like this make a lot less sense to my uninformed brain than a sack or pick 6.