Football Club AS Roma partners with Sorare to launch Digital Collectible Cards

Sorare is a fantasy football game league powered by distributed ledger technology. The game works similar to regular football fantasy leagues with two key differences.

The first is the use of blockchain technology to create digital collectible cards. Despite collectibles being popular in many forms in the digital age, they have all lacked one essential feature: scarcity.

The emergence of blockchain and distributed ledger technology has created an avenue through which it is possible to create digital collectibles that also possess scarcity. The most popular example of this is CryptoKitties, which rose to fame in 2017, eventually gaining infamy for congesting the Ethereum network. Similarly, Sorare leverages NFTs to create digital collectibles based on real-life football players.

The second distinguishing factor seen in the Sorare architecture is that all the assets sold within the game are officially licensed by football clubs and leagues. The digital cards available on Sorare are non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which represent football players. In turn, the platform splits its sales with a percentage going to the right holders (leagues, clubs or player associations). With AS Roma joining the game, the number of football clubs licensing to Sorare stands at 35.

Each player available for sale in the fantasy game will be issued with unlimited free common cards, 100 ‘rare’ cards, 10 ‘super rare’ cards and one final ‘unique’ card. A player’s team or line-up will be composed of five cards composed of certain mandatory posts, such as goalkeeper, forward, and defender. Players are eligible to win weekly prizes in tournaments. Winnings are influenced by the rarity of the cards included in the line up as well as the performance of the chosen players that week.

It is important to note that Sorare is a blockchain agnostic platform. The game is backed by a number of well-known names such as ConsenSys and Ubisoft.

Joseph Lubin-led Consenys invested in Sorare in the pre-seed round while the popular video game publisher added Sorare to its Entrepreneur Lab accelerator programme. The programme helps select gaming companies that show promise to grow their users and increase their market share.

The benefits for football clubs

AS Roma joins a growing list of well-known European clubs who have chosen to partner with Sorare, including Schalke, West Ham United, and fellow Italian side Napoli.

Football clubs, leagues, and other establishments that license their players to be sold on Sorare gain a number of advantages.

To begin with, the licensing party is likely to gain the reputation of being innovative and progressive. Participating in a nascent technology sector which increases fan engagement in a meaningful way favours the public standing of clubs.

Additionally, given the revenue split model employed by Sorare, the licensers stand to gain an additional revenue stream.

Lastly, the licensor is likely to be exposed to more brands through the partnership. This is also true of sections of the populace who are into gaming but not necessarily into football. Thus this is a good crossover opportunity.

For Sorare, the partnership propels the platform visibility in an advantageous way. Sorare’s Co-founder and CEO, Nicolas Julia, stated: “We are very proud to have signed this agreement with such an Italian heavyweight, and we thank them for their trust in Sorare. We see this as a new, key step in our vision to work with the best football clubs from around the world.”

Sorare provides an excellent use case for non-fungible, blockchain-powered tokens in e-gaming. Going forward, we can expect to see more tokenization of real-world assets. From football players to commodities and real estate to movie stars, there isn’t much that cannot be tokenized.