An important partnership between Sorare, a company specializing in NFT related to football, and the Bundesliga, the top German football league. The two companies have decided to collaborate on the marketing of a video game and a video linked to the German league using NFTs.
Summary
Sorare brings Bundesliga in the NFT world
In 2022, football fans will be able to use video clips of the best plays in the German league for a fantasy football game. This agreement will allow Sorare to grow further in the world of football, having already signed a partnership with the Spanish La Liga in September.
Sorare has also just closed a $680 million B-funding round, boasting deals with around 200 football clubs worldwide.
Sorare started out as a fantasy football game, where players buy, sell, trade and manage their own virtual team with digital player cards created by the company itself. This is done using the NFTs, the virtual tokens with which it is possible to buy and exchange ownership of an asset or part of an asset. The game uses Ethereum-based blockchain technology and was developed in 2018 by Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort.
It recently closed one of the largest Series B funding rounds in Europe, with $680 million raised, taking the company’s value to the stratospheric $4.3 billion
Some famous footballers, such as Barcelona’s Gerard Piqué, English Rio Ferdinand and German André Schürrle, are said to be in the company’s portfolio.
The game that has made the company famous is a type of digital fantasy football, where each user can form their own team of five players and deploy the line-up in different virtual competitions, with scores based on the athletes’ real performance. Since January, trading on the platform has reached $150 million and there are over 600,000 users.
On 13 March, Cristiano Ronaldo’s digital card was traded for 245,000 euros. There are eleven Italian teams on the platform including Juventus, Milan, Napoli, Lazio, Roma, Genova and Inter.
NFTs and sport
NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have been making inroads into the world of sport at all levels for months now.
Juventus auctioned off one of its digital jerseys for the current season, which sold for €30,000. However, it is not only football that has turned to this particular way of increasing its merchandising business.
The NBA, the American basketball league, is said to have earned around 250 million dollars in the last year through the sale of video images and cards linked to games and the best plays of basketball stars. A video of a play by James LeBron of the Los Angeles Lakers was sold in January for $200,000. The NBA signed a partnership about a year ago with Canada-based Dapper Labs, creators of the CryptoKitties game, to create a digital version of the famous American basketball league.
In September, the NFL, the American football league, also signed an agreement with the same Canadian blockchain company to market digital cards of the major American football stars.
