Issue 19: Olympic team collection, themed horses, platform stats

Here's your weekly review on what happened at the intersection of NFTs and Sports:

• 🥇 Team GB launches the first ever Olympic team NFT collection
• 🐎 NASCAR and ZED Run partner for themed NFT horses
• 👾 Monthly stats: NBA Top Shot, Sorare, Topps MLB

Let's have a closer look! 👀

👋 Feel free to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for the latest news and join our Discord server to discuss all things NFT and Sports.

So here's what happend in a rather calm NFT Sports week.

🥇 Team GB launches the first ever Olympic team NFT collection

Team Great Britain has launched their NFT Shop. The items were created in cooperation with Ben Sherman (one of the official supporters) and expressionist painter Ben Mosley and include Olympic inspired artwork. The NFTs are released daily during the Olympic games. Some of the items can be bought directly while other are auctioned.

Our take: Contrary to many other NFT drops Team GB does not include any physical experiences or items and goes with an all-digital approach. It's hard to predict if the pieces are seen as valuable from a fan perspective, but we do like that also Olympic teams are joining the NFT journey.

🐎 NASCAR and ZED run partner for themed NFT horses

What a headline :) NASCAR has partnered with ZED Run, the digital horse racing platform. It includes the drop of NASCAR-themed horses. What might sound surprising at first does look promising after taking a closer look. First of all, ZED Run has had multiple successful partnerships like this in recent months, amongst them one with Atari that grossed over $400,000 in revenue. Horse power jokes aside, car racing and horse racing do indeed have some similarities and potentially overlapping and/or compatible audiences. We expect this to be a successful partnership.

👾 Monthly stats: NBA Top Shot, Sorare, Topps MLB

Here's our monthly check of the most well-known NFT platforms in sports.

To make it quick: The struggle continues, a trend that we've been witnessing since the NFT peak in March this year.

• Sales: Sorare brought some hope, as sales and transaction significantly improved over the previous month. A 46.6% sales increase sounds really good, however we have to keep in mind that we were coming from comparably low numbers. Let's hope this is a turnaround that will last. MLB and NBA on the contrary had a horrible month. MLB's sales are below the $1m mark, it almost looks like they have given up on that project. Also the NBA suffered after the season ended and had to swallow a 52% decrease. Hopefully the new season can kick things of for them as well. Average sales prices are decreasing across all three platforms
• Unique buyers: This is the number that worries us the most. We've seen a steady decline over the last months and there is no end in sight. Even Sorare saw a 42% decline in a good sales month. And this is still good compared to the other two platforms who saw decreases of over 80%. Yes, over EIGHTY percent! MLB had only 343 unique buyers in July, while all platforms together combine for around 18,000 unique buyers, which is nothing compared to their total fan base

It seems like investors are not worried about the future of Sports NFTs though, as Sorare is reportedly closing in on a fresh $532m investment round with a $3.8b valuation. However, it seems like significant changes need to be made (or huge marketing pushes towards the fan base) in order to steer the NFT ship into steady waters.

🤓 Wrapping it up

So what have we learned in this week's issue?

• NFTs are relevant for Olympic teams as well, with Team Great Britain being the front-runner, and all other teams having three more years to figure out their strategy.
• NFT partnerships are of interest for established brands such as NASCAR or Atari and can lead to decent revenues if there is a good fit between the partners and their audiences
• The big NFT platforms keep struggling and there seems to be no end in sight. We expect them to have certain strategies in place for the new season, at least we hope so, or we have to hope for another NFT boom respectively mass market adoption

That's it for this weeks issue! And as always: Feel free to reach out for feedback and to discuss all things NFT and sports! And to stay up to date: Make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for stats, drop announcements and more. And join us on our Discord server to discuss the latest news and insights about NFTs in sports.