NFT fantasy football game Sorare raises $919m from investors including SoftBank, Gerard Pique
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Digital collectable cards, representing real-life football players, from online fantasy football game Sorare.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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LONDON (REUTERS) - Blockchain-based fantasy football game Sorare has raised US$680 million (S$919 million) in a funding round led by SoftBank, with footballers such as Spain's Gerard Pique and former England international Rio Ferdinand also investing, the company said on Tuesday (Sept 21).
Paris-based Sorare said the investment valued the company at US$4.3 billion.
Founded in 2018, Sorare is an online game where users buy officially licensed cards representing football players and build teams that play against each other, with the outcome based on the players' performance in real-life games.
The cards are traded in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a kind of crypto asset that records the ownership status of digital goods on the blockchain.
The market for NFTs has seen explosive growth in 2021, with collectable and sports-related ones the most popular types of token.
"We think NFTs represent a new paradigm... This evolution from physical assets to digital assets is very powerful, and creates a lot of exciting potential business models," Mr Michel Combes, president of SoftBank Group International, said in e-mailed comments.
Sorare is the largest sports-based NFT platform by sales volume, according to NonFungible.com, a website that tracks NFT market data. It plans to open an office in the United States and expand into sports other than football.
"We saw the immense potential that blockchain and NFTs brought to unlock a new way for football clubs, footballers and their fans to experience a deeper connection with each other," said Sorare co-founder and chief executive Nicolas Julia.
"We believe this is a huge opportunity to create the next sports entertainment giant."
Since January 2021, there have been US$150 million of sales on Sorare, which accepts payments via credit card and cryptocurrency ether. The most expensive unique card is of football star Cristiano Ronaldo, which was bought for €245,072 (S$388,330) on March 13.
The fund-raising round was SoftBank's first time investing in Sorare, via its SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
SoftBank's Latin America fund also contributed, which Mr Combes said was because SoftBank can use its relationships with United States and Latin American football leagues and its investment in broadcaster Televisa-Univision to increase Sorare's user base there.
This is not SoftBank's first foray into NFTs. It also led investment in NFT marketplace OpenSea in July and invested in the decentralised finance platform Juggernaut in March.
Other investors in Sorare's fund-raising include venture capital firms Accel and Bessemer Ventures, as well as France footballer Antoine Griezmann and Spain's Cesar Azpilicueta.
