Soccer Premier League lines up £30m deal with Sorare NFT platform
The Premier League, the top tier of England’s professional football league, is poised to expand its exposure to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through a potential partnership with NFT fantasy football game Sorare that could be worth around £30m ($34.6m) per share. year.
The collaboration will be discussed today during a meeting between club managers and company representatives, reported British broadcaster Sky News. Under the potential multi-year contract, the Premier League’s 20 clubs will allow their fans to purchase NFTs featuring the digital depictions of top athletes such as Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Tottenham Hotspur’s Harry Kane and Manchester City’s Erling Haaland, among others.
Industry sources with knowledge of the ongoing talks said the discussed contract with Sorare would replace a deal with ConsenSys that was close to being signed earlier this year. ConsenSys had attempted to renegotiate an agreement at a lower price following this year’s fall in NFT prices. However, an executive at the Premier League club said they had been informed that the Sorare deal would bring the 20 football clubs better financial terms.
Sorare is an NFT-based fantasy football manager game that allows users to play, acquire, buy and sell player cards as part of an immersive worldwide gaming experience. It allows users to build and manage their dream teams and I sell their top players for money.
The latest development comes shortly after Sorare secured large funds from investors to finance its further development. In late January 2022, a funding round led by Japan’s Softbank injected around $680 million into the Paris-based company.
In addition to the deal with the Premier League, other plans by Sorare include offsetting the company’s unavoidable carbon emissions by the end of this year, with the long-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2025.
“In July 2021, we reduced our corporate carbon footprint by 99 percent by migrating the vast majority of our transactions within the Ethereum blockchain to the more efficient Layer 2 network. Our long-term ambition is to align our decarbonization efforts with a long-term net-zero strategy, ” the company said in a statement.
With this in mind, the Paris-based business last month unveiled its partnership with Plan A, a carbon accounting, decarbonization and ESG reporting platform, as part of the firm’s “long-term sustainability strategy.”
At the same time, a separate contract to be signed by the Premier League and the NFT business Dapper Labs is also under negotiation.
