Find out what Football Collectible NFTs are, how they work, and why you should invest in this new asset class.
It is fair to say football collectibles have long been the mainstay of hardened sports memorabilia collectors. With Panini, Tops cards and many other brands holding their own over the years.
Now blockchain technology, in the form of NFTs, have created a new wave of collectible opportunities in the digital realm in the form of football collectible NFTs. A number of new platforms have now capitalised on this new trend and stand to create new business models, utility, gamification and a completely new asset class in this realm. In short you can now collect, trade and now earn from your favourite football collectibles NFT.
Who are the main platforms in this space:
- Sorare
- Ultimate Champions
- Fifa
- Footium
- Ultimate Fan
- Zilstars
- Fanzone
- TFC
- MFL
In this article, we will break down each of these promising projects and how you can profit from investing in them.
Sorare – own your game
Sorare is an NFT-based “play to earn” game.
Arguably the number 1 platform in the football NFT space. In Sorare, players collect and trade digital cards that feature real footballers. The cards aren’t simply digital photos; they’re blockchain-based NFTs.
What makes Sorare unique is that it has partnered with 180 football organizations, including some of the most famous clubs in Europe, such as Real Madrid, Liverpool and Juventus. This early mover advantage certainly gives sorare the edge over other competitors in the space.
The game of fantasy sports is all about having fun and collecting your favorite players. You can win cards through tournaments or buy them on the marketplace, which will help build up a team for competition in one of many different types each week.
The NFT technology comes in when minting these digital tokens with several categories of cards:
🟨 Limited (1000 cards per season)
🟥 Rare (100 cards per season)
🟦 Super Rare (10 cards per season)
⬛ Unique (1 card per season)
Common (GREY) cards have no scarcity, and cannot be traded.
How do you play?
- Users collect digital trading cards, which are virtual representations of real-life footballers.
- The cards’ performance is linked to that of the real players playing their games simultaneously.
- With NFT integration, cards are limited to specific quantities and ownership rights are clearly defined.
Sorare offers a wide variety of tournaments to participate in, with new specials being added monthly. The way Sorares organizes its competitions is through the use these “game weeks.” The game announces the upcoming 4 game weeks in monthly calendars that give a rundown of all the competitions that will be held each week. Based on the cards you have collected, you can choose with competition to entre your players. The tournaments include the following:
Once you buy the digital collectibles of the real football players, you can then play these cards in real time fantasy football style tournaments. Then, according to the real performance of the players in the football matches, you will earn prizes (in fiat or Ethereum). You can also trade NFTs for profit.
- All-Star
- Under 23
- Underdog League
- Specialist League
- Legend Challenge
- Champion Europe
- Challenger Europe
- America
- Asia
Sorare tournaments support squads with up to 5 players. Each team must have a maximum of 1 goalkeeper and a minimum of 1 defender, 1 midfielder and 1 forward. After having selected four players that fill up the required positions, you then select one final player to fill the extra slot.
In some tournaments, you can also select a team captain. The selected captain will have an additional 20% bonus on all his points for that given game week. Once you’re done, simply hit confirm to select your line-up. Points are scored using a ‘scoring matrix’ utilising performance metrics generated by OPTA. Your overall points are scored against other managers and the winning scores (usually top 20% of scores) win rewards in the form of Ethereum and other sorare cards.
How can you profit?
Trading
For buying NFT cards, you have two options:
- Purchase from on auction: Sorare consistently releases new cards into their marketplace. You have to place your bids for buying those cards, and if you win the auction, the corresponding card will be yours.
- Buy from other players: players can list the cards they own in the marketplace. The starting price is decided by the manager owning the NFTs. The purchase also will take place instantly, once you hit the buy button.
Usually, the Sorare marketplace cards will be cheaper. However, if you navigate through manager cards, you can also find good value cards. You can also send offers to sellers, or contact them on their social media (twitter, discord) to negotiate the price.
Competitions
Each competition has a prize pool for participants. Before registering your teams for competitions, you can also check their prize pools. Here is some information you can see in that section:
- Number of registered teams
- Total Prize in ETH (or fiat)
- Total Prize in the number of cards
- Details about different ranks and their prizes
How promising is this project?
Number of players
You sense Sorare’s massive growth has caught even them by surprise over the past 12-18 months and it has clearly taken time for them to catch up with that growth. They do now though seem to be making progress when it comes to speeding up recruitment and onboarding new employees to allow them to cope with the massively increased userbase.
User growth
You sense Sorare’s massive growth has caught even them by surprise over the past 12-18 months and it has clearly taken time for them to catch up with that growth. They do now though seem to be making progress when it comes to speeding up recruitment and onboarding new employees to allow them to cope with the massively increased userbase.
As their recent $680m raise shows, a lack of funds should not be an issue at Sorare right now and there’s not really any excuse for them not to have a first class team building what will hopefully be a world class app.
Investors and valuation
SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 has led a $680 million Series B round, which values the company at $4.3 billion
Ultimate Champions – the sorare killer
Next up is Ultimate Champions another free-to-play fantasy football game with officially licensed digital cards. Much like sorare you can mint various hosted as NFTs on the blockchain and play them in fantasy football-style tournaments.
Manager create their teams with the Ultimate Cards they own as NFT collectibles. As with Sorare you own the cards as unique NFTs. Unlike Sorare, Ultimate Champions utilise the Polygon blockchain rather than Ethereum.
Ultimate Champions use their own unique Scoring system where we attempt to value each position in the most balanced possible way using a wide array of statistics from every football game from Stats Perform (formerly known as Opta).
How do you play?
Tournaments are a game mode where players can register a team that meets varied restrictions per tournament to compete for leaderboard rewards every Gameweek.
- Each Tournament is split into multiple divisions, with higher divisions offering bigger rewards, but requiring higher rarity cards to enter.
- Each Ultimate Card can only be registered in 1 Tournament at a time.
- After each Gameweek, Managers in the top leaderboard positions of each Division will receive rewards.
How can you profit?
Trading
Competitions
After the Gameweek finishes, Tournament rewards are given based on your leaderboard position.
If you finished in one of the top positions and earned a reward, you can collect the reward from the Reward hub along with your League rewards.
The in-game wallet allows players to manage their balance of $MGC – Manager Contracts and $CHAMP – Ultimate Champions Token. The $CHAMP – Ultimate Champions Token is the main utility token used across Ultimate Champions. The demand of the $CHAMP will be positively correlated to the success of the game.
Players can fund their wallets or withdraw from their wallets. All rewards will also directly go to players’ wallets.
How promising is this project?
Currently, over 35 football clubs are licensed football clubs have an official partnership with Ultimate Champions.
Number of players
Investors
Fifa – the OG football game
Description of Fifa
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Footium – NFT Football Manager
Description of Footium
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Ultimate Fan – mobile NFT fantasy
Description of Ultimate fan
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Zilstars
Description of Zilstar
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Fanzone – newbie
Description of Fanzone
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TFC – web 3 football manager
Description of Ultimate champions
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New Football Proect
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How promising is this project?
By collecting and then playing your NFTs in lineups every week, its possible to earn rewards in the for of prizes.
By placing themselves at the top of the leaderboard, managers can additionally win something. They not only get rarer cards that allow them to play in higher leagues, but the cryptocurrency Ether also becomes available as a prize. Managers who did not make it to the first place can also win some Ether. The decisive factor is ultimately the score. Its possible with above average scores to regularly earn 0.01 to 0.02 ETH per week, in addition to winning additional cards.
Whats next for Football NFTs?
Currently platforms like Sorare are still quite early in the adoption curve. However user growth and asset value growth is really starting to take hold.
In April 2020, the migration to the Ethereum blockchain was completed. This is expected to increase Layer 2 applications’ efficiency and scalability. In July, another funding round of $4 million was taken. The Series A fundraising round collected another $50 million in February 2021, and the $680 billion Series B took place six months later in September 2021.