The Premier League, the top tier of England’s professional soccer league, is readying to expand its exposure to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through a potential partnership with NFT fantasy soccer game Sorare that could be worth some £30 million ($34.6 million) per year.
The cooperation is to be discussed today during a meeting of club executives and company representatives, UK broadcaster Sky News reported. Under the potential multi-year contract, the Premier League’s 20 clubs will allow their fans to purchase NFTs with the digital depictions of top athletes such as Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Harry Kane of Tottenham Hotspur, 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 a deal at a lower price following this year’s drop in NFT prices. However, a Premier League club executive said they had been informed the contract with Sorare contract would provide the 20 soccer clubs with better financial conditions.
Sorare is an NFT-based fantasy football manager game which allows its 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 l sell their top players for money.
The latest development comes shortly after Sorare secured major funds from investors to finance its further development. In late January 2022, a funding round led by Japan’s Softbank injected some $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 of 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 decarbonisation efforts to a long-term net-zero strategy,” the company said in a statement.
With this in mind, last month, the Paris-based business unveiled its partnership with Plan A, a carbon accounting, decarbonisation, 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 NFT business Dapper Labs is reportedly also under negotiations.
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