4 min read

Issue 36: Sorare's plans, key steps, NFT frames

Issue 36: Sorare's plans, key steps, NFT frames

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

  • ⚽ Sorare's founder talks about business and future
  • 🧐 Deloitte publishes insights on NFTs in sports
  • 🖼️ NBA partners with Infinite Objects, Premier League confirms plans

Let's have a closer look! 👀

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⚽ Sorare's founder talks about business and future

Here are some interesting insights about Sorare's business, provided by our friend Olivier: Nicolas Julia (co-founder of Sorare) did a 2 hours podcast  (in French). These are Olivier's key takeaways:

Early days:
-> When they went to negotiate their first deal with the Jupiter League, they use their own money to pay for the minimum guarantee

Funding:
->April 2019 w/ Kima & Seedcamp - 500k euros
-> Summer 2020 w/ headlines + Partech - 4 million euros+ 3 millions euros in Oct 2020 (and a bit of Pique via Cassius)
-> Feb 2021: Benchmark + Axcel 40 millions euros (and a bit of Griezmann)
->Summer 2021: Softbank 680 millions dollars

The business
-> Key things is to sign now deal with leagues. Used to be 3 years, now looking to do 5 to 6 year deal with MG
-> At the moment, there is no secondary market premium, which means Sorare does not make money when you resell a card! (but it is coming for next season)
-> If they loose right to a club or a league, card remains yours forever!

The future
2 main objectives
-> Conquer the US market and U.S. sports, especially with Ryan Spoon joining - (Opening an office in NYC)
-> Have the 20 main football leagues signed
-> Develop the media and dev ecosystem

Thanks a lot, Olivier! Really interesting, especially the plans to conquer the U.S. market with all the big gun competitors already being active (Panini, Candy, etc.).

🧐 Deloitte publishes insights on NFTs in sports

Deloitte has published an article on the future of NFTs in sports. Besides other insights, here are their "ten key steps to help create a successful platform":

  • Confer a specific set of rights for content that could be sold as video clips and associated metadata within an NFT.
  • Build or work with an online platform that can cope with surges in transaction volume and global demand.
  • Identify a partner that can mint content into an NFT, noting that costs for minting vary considerably.
  • Generate a scalable process, assisted by artificial intelligence, to identify and grade clips that could be sold as a set.
  • Incorporate a robust “know your customer” process, as any tradable asset could become a vector for money laundering.
  • Make the service as attractive to those on pocket-money budgets as to high-net-worth individuals looking for long-term investments.
  • Iterate tirelessly, experimenting with ways to keep different types of collectors engaged, such as team-building sprints, sports betting, and other challenges.
  • Consider complementary activities such as fantasy team-building competitions, an activity that could also be used to collect data about fans, with their permission.
  • Have a zero-carbon plan.
  • Finally, consider video clips as just the beginning of an NFT strategy. NFTs can also be applied to other sports products such as tickets to a game and physical collectibles.

An interesting read, with much of the content staying rather on the "high level side" though. We're still early ;)

🖼️ NBA partners with Infinite Objects, Premier League confirms plans

NFTs are not just for the digital world, as we can see via the new partnership between the NBA and Infinite Objects, which lets fans and collectors print their NBA Top Shot moments. All of the frames are authenticated, meaning that users need to connect their wallet and prove that they own the NFT they want to print. Every Infinite Objects video print holds only a single NBA Top Shot Moment.

Source: NBA, Infinite Objects

While the NBA keeps being the front runner with regards to league activities in the NFT field, there's another big league that is planning to join the trend. In a recent meeting with fan representatives the Premier League has confirmed plans to publish NFTs. The league is "seriously thinking about partnering with a cryptocurrency platform to sell NFTs, but its approach will be slow and cautious per The Times."

🤓 Wrapping it up

So what have we learned in this issue?

  • The fight for rights is heating up. While we've been talking about this for a while now, the interview with Sorare founder Nicolas Julia now explicitly confirms it. Their step into U.S. territory and aggressive plans to sign more leagues will be interesting to watch, while the U.S. giants will likely look across the pond as well.
  • Lots of NFT groundwork needs to be done. This refers to most of the rights holders in the sports industry who aim to understand more about NFTs and all the implications in and around them. This is understandable as it is such a new topic and tech and legal components can be tricky at times. This will cause some trouble in the early days, but is a necessary step to be taken.
  • NFTs do have a physical component. While also that is not new, the partnership between the NBA and Infinite Object shows how important and potentially also financially attractive a complementing physical offering can be.

And 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! 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.