Blake Martinez made his NFL comeback on Thursday Night Football, barely a year after retiring from the sport to pursue a career trading Pokemon cards and months after his burgeoning business came to a screeching halt due to scandal.

The 29-year-old inside linebacker, who played for the Green Bay Packers, New York Giants and Las Vegas Raiders across seven seasons, was signed to the Pittsburgh Steelers roster on Nov. 22, two weeks after he joined the Carolina Panthers practice squad. His first game back was the Dec. 7 showdown against the New England Patriots.

Asked about the allegations that brought down his trading card business, Martinez told reporters in Charlotte, N.C., on Nov. 7: “I don’t want to go too far deep into it. I think the main thing I want to address is there’s a lot of things out there that aren’t true, a lot of speculations, a lot of false claims. But still working through those types of things.”

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At the age of 28, Martinez ditched the NFL to double down on his side hustle of selling Pokemon cards upon rediscovering his passion for the game in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he told The Athletic.

His football teammates didn’t understand at first.

“Isn’t that stuff for kids?” they asked.

But the linebacker silenced all naysayers when he netted a $108,000 profit by simply opening a box of Pokemon cards on a live stream and auctioning them off to viewers one by one.

He used that model to launch a business called Blake’s Breaks in July 2022, which he says brought in more than $11.5 million in revenue in less than a year by reselling trading cards on Whatnot, a shopping platform that specializes in collectibles. He had made a nice chunk of change — without the physical toll and risks of being a pro football player….