Footballers, in many ways, are the ideal customer base when it comes to NFTs. They’re wealthy and competitive enough to want to get ahead of the game. They must get bored away from the pitch, too, and we imagine seeking out unusual investment opportunities is a pretty good way to spend the downtime between games.
NFT stands for non-fungible tokens, with “non-fungible”, meaning that the digital items can’t be copied. Whereas some digital items, like Bitcoin, are fungible and identical in form, no two NFTs are the same.
NFTs can be compared to the well-known trading cards: For example, the fan buys a pack of 5 cards and, when opening it, discovers which players are now in his possession. The exciting thing is which category each card belongs to. The concept of trading cards, which come in different levels of rarity, can be implemented relatively easily with NFTs on the blockchain: Fanzone, which offers the digital trading cards for the German national team, among others, has five different rarity levels.
Sorare: The first company to make a move
he first mover for digital football trading cards is Sorare from France, which already offers trading cards of the respective players from more than 150 clubs. Sorare has benefited in particular from the hype in the NFT market, which has driven the prices of various singles to astronomical heights.
For example, there are individual Sorare Unique or Super Rare NFTs for which more than 50,000 euros have already been paid. Each new season, 1111 new cards are created per player, 1000 of them in the Limited class, 100 in the Rare class, 10 in the Super Rare class and one in the Unique class. The special feature of the Sorare trading cards is the possibility to put together a team of 5 players and compete against other teams in competitions.
Expensive NFTs ever sold
Lionel Messi: “The Golden One” — $1,128,815
A licensed NFT collection called “Messiverse” containing NFT assets that feature soccer legend Lionel Messi was auctioned to the public. The collection included this 1/1 “The Golden One” designed by Bosslogic, a famous artist known for his work on Marvel Studios projects. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson even reached out to BossLogic to create some art for one of his upcoming movies.
This 1/1 Messi NFT had a reserve price set at $50,000 but rocketed to over $1 million in bids. While the final sale price hasn’t been recorded on Ethernity’s website, the last published bid hit $1.12 million, which is 161% of the value of the most expensive physical soccer rookie card ever sold.
