NBA, NBA Players Association strikes deal with Sorare for NFT Fantasy Game

The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) have entered into an agreement with Sorare to create the league’s first NFT-based fantasy game.

Sorare, a fantasy sports and NFT trading platform valued last year at $4.3 billion, earlier this year formed similar partnerships with Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball. They marked the company’s entry into the American market. Sorare also holds licenses with more than 280 international football clubs in top leagues such as Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A.

Sorare aims to launch the NBA game around the league’s regular season opener on October 18. The terms of the multi-year agreement were not made public.

Major League Baseball received a stake in Sorare as part of the deal announced in May. Ryan Spoon, Sorare’s chief executive officer, and Scott Kaufman-Ross, the NBA’s senior vice president and head of gaming and new business ventures, would not say whether the NBA secured a stake in Sorare as part of the partnership.

“The way I would describe it is that we’re both very motivated to grow together and to make this as successful and broad and big as possible,” said Spoon, a former ESPN and BetMGM executive who joined Sorare in October 2021. “It’s in all our interests.”

Kaufman-Ross said: “We know Sorare is making an investment to build out this platform. This is a new fan experience, so we want to make sure there’s enough time to build the product and the community and the fan base. It’s a multi-year partnership with enough time to build a sustainable partnership here.”

The Sorare NBA game will be free to play for anyone at least 18 years old. Participants will create teams based on the NFTs/cards of individual players. They will earn points based on how their players perform on the court in NBA games.

“This (deal) is an interesting hybrid in that there is an overlap between the fantasy sports space and the Web3 and blockchain space,” Kaufman-Ross said. “Sorare sits at the intersection of two interesting trends – Web3 and fantasy. The idea of ​​creating a new form of fantasy basketball that drives real engagement with our game and also utilizes Web3 is a great opportunity for our fans.”

The NBA and the NBPA, its players’ association, recognize fantasy sports and NFTs as separate categories. Most notably, they partnered with Dapper Labs in 2019 to develop NBA Top Shot, an NFT marketplace that gained popularity last year as NBA fans and speculators flooded the market.

February saw record sales of $224.1 million for a record average sale of $181.81 on the NBA Top Shot market, according to CryptoSlam, but that has declined significantly. August saw just over $1 million in NBA Top Shot sales for an average of $24, down from $37.5 million and $45.01 in August 2021.

The NBA and NBPA view Sorare as an alternative to NBA Top Shot and not as a competitor because Sorare has a fantasy game element.

“We were looking for new ways to enter the fantasy category,” said Josh Goodstadt, executive vice president of licensing at THINK450, the NBPA’s marketing and licensing subsidiary. “We evaluated at least a dozen opportunities. For us, what we wanted to do was find something different from NBA Top Shot… We felt with Sorare’s history of success, as leaders in the Web3 space, they just made the most sense for us to partner with with.”

Sorare was founded in France in 2018 by Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort, who worked together at Stratumn, a Paris-based fintech company. Sorare raised $50 million in a Series A funding round in February 2021 and $680 million in a Series B round in September 2021 that valued the company at a valuation of $4.3 billion.

SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate, led Sorare’s Series B round, which was the largest ever for a European startup. Sorare’s other investors include notable venture capital firms such as Benchmark, Accel, D1 Capital, Bessemer Ventures and Seven Seven Six, which is led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Sorare claims it has two million registered users in 185 countries, about 20% of which are in the US. The company has been expanding its presence in the US since the end of last year with the hiring of Spoon and other managers and employees. Spoon has strong ties to the American professional sports leagues from his time at ESPN, where he was senior vice president of digital and social, and BetMGM, where he was chief operating officer. The company expects to expand in the US and abroad.

“What I think about every day is that we have a big, robust game today that has a big community, a global community,” Spoon said. “The starting part there was and is football. The priority is to continue to grow and deepen the community, the use, the game. I think this (NBA partnership) fits really well with having other great leagues and players.”