Football trading card game Sorare NFT has teamed up with the Premier League on a multi-year licensing deal.
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Sorare, the $4.3 billion fantasy football game, has signed a multi-year deal with the Premier League that will see the world’s top official football league license player cards.
Players of the game will be able to purchase and use official Premier League licensed NFTs under the exclusive multi-year deal.
Paris-based startup Sorare, which has 3 million users worldwide, lets people compete in fantasy five-a-side football matches. The chances of success are based on the real-time performance of the players on the field.
Sorare said he’s also launching two new features in the game. These include the ability to compete with league-specific player cards and a “financial fair play” feature that prevents users from selecting teams. of stars.
Sorare is rumored to be in talks with the Premier League – the top tier of men’s football leagues in England – over a licensing deal in October 2022. Sorare CEO Nicolas Julia said the Things had taken longer than expected as the Premier League had an existing NFT licensing agreement with another company.
Sky News earlier reported the deal was worth £30m. Julia declined to share details about the financial terms and length of the deal.
The news comes despite a sharp drop in NFT trading activity.
The values of NFTs – or non-fungible tokens – have fallen amid a crypto price decline known as “crypto winter”, exacerbated in recent months by the bankruptcy of major exchange FTX.
According to data site CryptoSlam, the average selling price of an NFT in December 2022 was $143.22, down 63% from $383.73 in December 2021.
Trading volumes are also down significantly. Overall NFT sales fell 78% in December to $678.2 million from $3.1 billion a year ago.
Julia said Sorare has “a very different streak to the rest of space”. Total card trades on the platform stood at $500 million last year, nearly doubling from $270 million in 2021.
Still, the company has noticed a shift in usage with players more inclined to use its “free-to-play” mode where they don’t have to compete with paid cards.
Some 87% of Sorare players “don’t even spend money on the platform,” Julia said.
This raised an obvious question about the sustainability of Sorare’s model: how does it make money when most of its users aren’t transacting?
For her part, Julia said that high spending users are enough to anchor revenue generation. Sorare takes an unspecified share of all transactions through its service.
It should be noted that Sorare is the third largest NFT collection in the world, according to data from CryptoSlam. The company processes around $1 million in transactions over a 24-hour period, according to figures from CryptoSlam.
The Premier League’s partnership with Sorare adds to a slew of deals between sports leagues and crypto platforms.
Sorare himself has already announced deals with Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.
Some deals, like Crypto.com’s deal for naming rights to the Staples Center arena in Los Angeles and FTX’s now-defunct sponsorship of the Miami-Dade Arena, have soured amid falling prices of cryptography.
Julia said Sorare was immune to the fallout from the crash on crypto-focused sports advertising because her business focuses on intellectual property licensing rather than sponsorships.
The French startup was last valued by investors at $4.3 billion in September 2021. Sorare is backed by big names, including the Japanese Soft Bank and venture capital firms Accel and Benchmark. It also counts sports stars Lionel Messi, Serena Williams and Kylian Mbappe among its shareholders.
Sorare has not been without controversy and has been criticized for accusations that he encourages gambling.
The UK Gambling Commission is investigating the company “to determine whether Sorare.com requires a license to operate or whether the services it provides do not constitute gambling,” according to an October 8, 2021 notice.
Julia said he was not yet able to provide an update on the process of the UK inquiry.
In November, the startup pledged to make some changes to its platform after action by the National Gaming Authority. These included bolstering the free elements of the game. The company is required to implement these measures by March 31.
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