Blake Martinez has had no problems transitioning to life beyond the NFL.
The former linebacker, who played with the Green Bay Packers, New York Giants and Las Vegas Raiders, has found a new job starting his own business of selling Pokèmon cards in which he has made more than $5 million in just seven months, according to a CNBC report.
Martinez, whose made $28.9 million in career earnings, per Spotrac, began selling Pokèmon cards as a hobby during the COVID-19 pandemic. He picked it up again while rehabbing from an ACL injury in 2021 and decided to launch his own company, Blake’s Breaks, last July.
In November, while trying to hold onto a roster spot with the Raiders after being released by the Giants, Martinez decided to commit to selling cards full time.
“Every single day when I wake up, my shoulder doesn’t hurt and my back doesn’t hurt anymore,” Martinez told CNBC. “When all that hurts are my fingers from opening, like, 1,000 packs for cards per day, I think, ‘I’m going to keep doing this.’”
A quarter of the $5 million Martinez has made with Blake’s Breaks gets reinvested into the company while the rest is take-home pay for himself and 15 contract employees, per CNBC.
Martinez said he began collecting Pokèmon cards as a child but the thousands of cards he collected in a binder were given away by his mother over time.
It was not until during the pandemic when Martinez saw influencers reselling playing cards that he decided to spend $30,000 on boxes of cards to try and get them back and would stream himself opening them on the platform Whatnot.
Cards sold anywhere from $5 to as high as $672,000.
The 29-year-old hopes to ultimately sell collectibles in all of Whatnot’s categories (there are more than 50 of them) and open more warehouses in the U.K. and Canada (he currently has two in Miami and Denver with a third opening in New Jersey).
In seven years in the NFL, Martinez had 13 sacks, four interceptions, four forced fumbles, three fumble recoveries and 706 tackles, including leading the NFL with 144 tackles in 2017.
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