PSA’s Owner Bought SGC and Beckett. Now It Faces an Antitrust Lawsuit

Updated September 6, 2026. This article distinguishes allegations in a pending federal lawsuit from established facts and from the defendants’ arguments. The case has not produced a finding that Collectors, PSA, SGC or Beckett violated antitrust law.

Card grading, consolidation and one very uncomfortable question

Three famous grading labels. One corporate owner. PSA, SGC and Beckett still look like separate choices when a collector is deciding where to send a card. But they now sit inside the same Collectors family, and a federal proposed class action says that consolidation crossed the line from aggressive expansion into unlawful monopoly maintenance.

The PSA antitrust lawsuit is now headed toward an important procedural hearing. Michael Rasmussen filed Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, Inc. et al. in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on April 14, 2026. His complaint targets Collectors, PSA, SGC and Beckett Grading Services under Section 2 of the Sherman Act and Section 7 of the Clayton Act.

The complaint says Collectors’ acquisitions of SGC and Beckett left the group with roughly 80% of the U.S. individual-card grading market. Collectors denies the theory and has moved to compel arbitration and to dismiss the case. The publicly accessible docket sources we verified list both motions for a September 11, 2026 hearing before Judge John W. Holcomb.

How PSA, SGC and Beckett came under one owner

PSA was already the giant in third-party card grading when Collectors added two of the best-known alternatives.

• February 29, 2024Collectors acquired SGC. At the time, SGC president Peter Steinberg said SGC would remain an independent grading brand and that no changes were contemplated. PSA and SGC were expected to operate separately.
• July 2025SGC’s direction changed. Steinberg resigned, Collectors resources were being shared with PSA, and industry reporting described plans to scale SGC back toward a smaller, boutique-style grading operation.
• December 15, 2025Collectors announced a definitive agreement to acquire Beckett. Collectors said Beckett would remain an independent brand, with its own operations, customer experience and grading standards. It also said there would be no pricing change as part of the acquisition.
• December 19, 2025Rep. Pat Ryan asked the FTC to investigate. His public letter argued the consolidation deserved antitrust scrutiny. A congressional request for an investigation is not the same thing as an FTC finding or enforcement action.
• April 14, 2026Michael Rasmussen filed the federal antitrust complaint. The lawsuit seeks damages and injunctive relief on behalf of a proposed class of PSA customers.
• June 8, 2026Collectors moved to compel arbitration and to dismiss. Both motions are listed for a September 11 hearing.
• July 9, 2026Collectors named Jesse Steinberg general manager of SGC. The company described a new focus on grading capacity, technology, operations and customer service, showing that SGC remains an active brand rather than a shuttered one.

That last point is important. The plaintiff’s theory is not that Collectors literally erased the SGC and Beckett logos. The theory is that independent competitors became commonly owned businesses, changing the competitive pressure between them. Collectors’ answer, in simplified form, is that separate brands can remain distinct, the industry is growing rapidly, rivals such as CGC can expand, and the complaint does not plausibly connect the acquisitions to the harms Rasmussen alleges.

If you want the basic mechanics of why grading-company choice matters to card values in the first place, Cards Mania’s guide to how trading-card grading works covers the grading process, standards and market effect without the courtroom detour.

Where does the “about 80%” card-grading figure come from?

The complaint says that before the challenged acquisitions PSA controlled roughly 72% of the relevant market, SGC roughly 5%, Beckett roughly 3%, and CGC roughly 18%. It then adds PSA, SGC and Beckett together and alleges Collectors controls roughly 80%.

Independent grading-volume data show why the number is not coming out of thin air. According to 2025 figures attributed to GemRate, the five largest graders processed about 26.8 million cards:

The volume figures and shares above are rounded as reported from GemRate data. Also note the timing: Beckett was not under Collectors for most of 2025. Grouping the full-year output by the brands that were under Collectors by early 2026 produces roughly 80% of this tracked volume. That is a useful industry snapshot, not a court-approved antitrust market share.

There is another fact worth keeping in the picture. The same 2025 data show CGC grading volume up sharply year over year and TAG also expanding. That does not answer the lawsuit, but it does make the market more interesting than a simple “one company and nobody else” story.

What the PSA antitrust lawsuit actually alleges

The complaint is aggressive. It says Collectors did not merely buy two businesses. It says Collectors bought important competitive constraints on PSA and then used common control to weaken competition on price and service.

1. The SGC acquisition allegedly removed a lower-cost, faster rival

Rasmussen alleges SGC had been gaining ground by offering lower prices and faster turnaround times than PSA. The complaint says that after the 2024 acquisition, SGC’s cheapest service moved from $15 to $18 and that some faster-service pricing increased much more dramatically. It also points to longer turnaround estimates and the later decision to shrink SGC toward a boutique model.

PLAINTIFF ALLEGATION Those price, service and causation claims are disputed. They have not been established as facts by a court.

2. The Beckett deal allegedly removed another independent decision-maker

The complaint characterizes the Beckett transaction as the next step in a serial acquisition strategy. Collectors’ own December 2025 announcement, however, emphasized the opposite framing: Beckett would keep its own operations, customer experience and grading standards, with no acquisition-related pricing change.

That creates a very clean question for the case. Is preserving separate branding and grading standards enough to preserve meaningful competition when major strategic decisions ultimately sit under one owner?

3. The plaintiff uses concentration math to support the theory

The complaint calculates the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI, using its proposed market shares. It says the HHI was 5,542 before the acquisitions, rose to 6,287 after SGC, and then to 6,724 after Beckett.

The U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission’s 2023 Merger Guidelines, which are non-binding agency guidance, identify a post-merger HHI above 1,800 combined with an increase greater than 100 points as a structural indicator that can support a presumption of substantially lessened competition.

4. The proposed class is narrower than “every collector”

Rasmussen proposes a class consisting of people and entities in the United States and its territories who purchased PSA trading-card grading services from February 29, 2024 until the alleged anticompetitive effects cease.

PROCEDURAL FACT The class has only been proposed. It has not been certified.

5. The requested relief is substantial

The complaint asks for damages, including the antitrust remedy of treble damages where available, attorneys’ fees, injunctive relief and orders that could require Collectors to unwind or divest the SGC and Beckett acquisitions.

Requested relief is not predicted relief. A complaint can ask for a lot. Whether the plaintiff can get any of it is a completely different question.

How Collectors is fighting back

Collectors is attacking the case before the parties ever get close to a trial.

A central defense argument is timing and demand. Card grading has exploded. A company can raise capacity, change service tiers, lengthen turnaround estimates or reallocate staff because it is drowning in submissions, not because it is exploiting monopoly power.

That is not a complete antitrust defense by itself, but it is an obvious alternative explanation the plaintiff will have to deal with.

Collectors also attacks Rasmussen’s own standing and alleged injury. According to the dismissal motion, he does not plead enough detail about which PSA service he bought, what he paid or how the acquisitions allegedly inflated his price or turnaround time. Collectors further argues that he does not allege submitting cards to SGC or Beckett, and that the PSA submission identified in his account history predates the Beckett transaction. Those are defense arguments, not findings by the court, but they could matter before the judge ever reaches the broader monopoly theory.

Collectors also challenges the complaint’s treatment of competitive alternatives. CGC grew dramatically in 2025. TAG grew too. The defense argues the complaint cannot simply look at four large firms, label their output the market and treat every other source of competition as irrelevant.

Does an 80% share automatically mean Collectors has an illegal monopoly?

No.

That may be the least exciting sentence in this article, but it is also the most important legal one.

A large market share can be powerful evidence of market power, especially when entry barriers are high. But a Sherman Act monopolization claim requires more than “big company is very big.” The court has to deal with the relevant market, monopoly power, exclusionary or anticompetitive conduct, causation and antitrust injury. The Clayton Act acquisition claims similarly depend on whether the challenged transactions may substantially lessen competition in a properly defined market.

So the real fight is not just over the numerator. It is over the denominator.

Those are economic questions disguised as hobby arguments. Collectors can point to a growing market and expanding rivals. Rasmussen can point to PSA’s enormous scale, the network effects of population reports and registries, collector trust, resale liquidity, the scarcity of experienced graders and the fact that acquiring a rival is different from beating it.

Then the grading machines jammed

The timing is almost comically perfect for a monopoly lawsuit, even though the facts do not establish that the acquisitions caused the submission pauses.

On June 2, 2026, PSA temporarily paused Value Bulk, Value, Value Plus and Value Max submissions after saying a roughly 20% spike in submissions had pushed its backlog toward 10 million items. PSA launched a public backlog tracker and said the pause was tied to operational milestones.

By August 25, PSA reported an active global backlog of approximately 10.9 million units. PSA also says it has increased grading capacity nearly five-fold since 2021, opened a fifth grading hub in Plano, Texas, and is working through a major capacity expansion.

Beckett has its own bottleneck. On August 5, Beckett temporarily paused new Base and Standard submissions while keeping Express and Priority open. Beckett said cards submitted were up 102% year over year from July 2025 to July 2026, TCG cards graded were up 159%, and new collectors were up 65%. Beckett currently says it expects to begin reopening the paused services on September 15, subject to operational progress.

Still, the backlog story cuts both ways. It supports Collectors’ argument that the entire hobby is dealing with extraordinary demand. At the same time, it shows why independent alternatives can matter most when a dominant provider is overloaded. If collectors have fewer independently controlled large-scale options during a capacity crunch, the competitive structure becomes more than an academic question.

Cards Mania covered the PSA Value-tier pause when it first hit in our June 7 trading-card news roundup. The backlog is now lower than its late-July peak, but it is still enormous.

Can three grading labels owned by one company really represent consumer choice?

This is the collector version of the whole case, and the answer is more nuanced than either side’s best slogan.

Yes, the labels can still represent product choice. PSA, SGC and Beckett can use different holders, aesthetics, grading standards, subgrades, turnaround models and brand positioning. A collector choosing an SGC tuxedo instead of a PSA slab is making a real product choice.

But common ownership changes the meaning of competitive choice. Three brands owned by the same parent are not three independent companies deciding whether to undercut each other’s prices, hire the same scarce graders, expand capacity, launch a cheaper service or aggressively chase the other’s customers.

That does not automatically make the arrangement illegal. It does mean that counting logos is not the same thing as counting independent competitive decision-makers.

There is also a trust angle that sits beside, but is legally separate from, the antitrust claims. Collectors owns PSA and SGC, now lists Beckett among its brands, and also operates businesses elsewhere in the collectibles ecosystem. That can create efficiencies. It also makes transparency more important because graders influence both the condition label and the economic language of the secondary market.

We explored a different version of that trust problem in our PSA Partner Offers and grade-change controversy. That story is not evidence in this antitrust case, but it explains why collectors are unusually sensitive to questions about concentration and conflicts inside grading.

What about CGC and TAG?

Any fair monopoly story has to mention the companies that Collectors does not own.

CGC graded about 4.92 million cards in 2025 according to the GemRate figures reported across the hobby, roughly 18% of the five-brand total, and its volume more than doubled year over year. TAG was much smaller at around 440,000 cards, but also grew sharply.

Those numbers give Collectors a straightforward answer to the idea that competition has disappeared: rivals exist, at least one is large, and they are expanding.

The plaintiff’s counter is that raw volume does not tell the whole story. Grading is unusually dependent on reputation, resale acceptance, population data, registry culture and the premium buyers assign to specific labels. A new grader can buy equipment. It cannot instantly buy thirty years of collector trust.

That argument is likely to matter if this case survives the early procedural fight.

If you want to see the practical alternatives rather than just the biggest names, use Cards Mania’s Trading Card Grading Finder or browse our source-backed grading companies reference. They track current submission routes, service availability and published fees without treating every grader as interchangeable on resale value or reputation.

Want to see how much the label still matters in the real market? Compare completed sales rather than asking prices. For example, you can review PSA 10 sports-card sold listings on eBay. A slab premium is not the same thing as legal market power, but it is a useful reminder that grading brands have economic value beyond the plastic holder.

What happens next?

September 11 is not a monopoly trial. Nobody is showing up with an economist, a pile of slabs and a verdict by lunchtime.

The immediate questions are procedural and pleading-based:

1. Arbitration: does Rasmussen have to pursue his dispute in arbitration rather than federal court, and can he proceed on a class basis?
2. Dismissal: assuming the court reaches the merits, has the complaint plausibly pleaded a relevant market, anticompetitive conduct, injury and causation?
3. If dismissed, then what? Depending on the ruling, the plaintiff could potentially receive leave to amend some defects.
4. If the case survives: then the expensive part begins. Discovery could put internal strategy, pricing, staffing, capacity and acquisition documents under a microscope. Market-definition economics and class certification would become major battles later.

The public docket page we verified was last retrieved by Justia on June 9, so collectors following the September hearing should check a current docket source before treating the schedule as immovable. Federal motion dates can change.

What collectors should watch instead of choosing a side today

• Pricing across PSA, SGC and Beckett. Not one isolated increase, but whether their service tiers start moving together over time.
• Turnaround times and capacity. Especially whether independent competitors can absorb volume when Collectors-owned brands pause cheaper tiers.
• SGC’s actual 2026 direction. Collectors has now installed a new general manager and says it is investing in capacity and operations. Watch what happens, not just what was said in 2025.
• Beckett’s promised independence. The company publicly promised its own grading standards and operations. That gives collectors a concrete benchmark for future changes.
• CGC and TAG growth. If they keep scaling, the defense’s competition story becomes stronger. If they cannot meaningfully constrain pricing or service despite demand, the plaintiff’s barriers-to-entry theory becomes more interesting.
• The September 11 ruling or hearing outcome. Arbitration or dismissal could change the entire trajectory before the antitrust economics are ever tested.

And no, none of this is a reason to panic-sell every PSA, SGC or Beckett slab in your collection. Court cases do not magically invalidate grades. The better collector response is much less dramatic: understand who owns the brands, compare services, watch real turnaround performance and keep receipts when the market is changing fast.

FAQ: PSA, SGC, Beckett and the Collectors antitrust lawsuit

Bottom line

Can three competing grading labels represent consumer choice when the same company owns all three?

They can represent three different products. They do not represent three independent owners.

That difference is the reason this lawsuit matters.

Collectors has a credible story to tell about explosive demand, continued brand independence, capacity investment and growing rivals. Rasmussen has a credible question about what happens when the dominant grader’s parent buys two recognizable competitors and ends up connected to roughly four out of every five cards graded by the largest brands.

The court has not answered that question. On September 11, it may not answer it yet. The first fight is whether this particular plaintiff can keep the case in court at all.

For collectors, that is almost more interesting. We have spent years arguing PSA versus SGC versus Beckett as if the labels themselves were the competition. Now a federal case is asking whether the ownership behind the labels matters more.

Sources and further reading

• Federal complaint: Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, Inc. et al., filed April 14, 2026
• Justia docket: Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, Inc. et al.
• Value Added Resource: Collectors’ arbitration and dismissal arguments, with motion documents
• Collectors: December 15, 2025 Beckett acquisition announcement
• Collectors: current brand portfolio listing PSA, Beckett and SGC
• Sports Illustrated: February 29, 2024 SGC acquisition and independence statement
• Sports Collectors Daily: July 2025 SGC leadership change, shared resources and boutique-brand strategy
• Collectors: July 9, 2026 SGC general manager announcement
• PSA Backlog Tracker
• Beckett card-grading availability update
• Sports Illustrated: 2025 grading volume based on GemRate data
• U.S. DOJ and FTC: 2023 Merger Guidelines and non-binding status
• Rep. Pat Ryan: December 19, 2025 request for FTC investigation

Editorial note: Court filings state allegations and legal arguments, not established facts. Cards Mania will update this article if the court rules on the pending motions or if PSA, SGC, Beckett or Collectors materially change the service information described above.