Bundesliga, the German top-flight football league, has joined the growing list of sporting leagues that are taking advantage of the Non Fungible Tokens NFT Its commercial division, Bundesliga International, has announced a 2 year partnership with the football-focused NFT platform, Sorare and sports collectibles company, Topps.
Sorare, which has a number of commercial partnerships with famous world-class players such as Antoine Griemann and Gerard Pique as part of its strategic investors, has been on a bullish run in recent months, making it the number NFT platform for football.
The platform, which raised $650 million from a Series B funding round, is a five-a-side fantasy football game. It is built on the Ethereum block, and players can buy digital trading cards of footballers to build a team. These digital cards are ERC 721 NFTs and can be verified publicly on the Ethereum blockchain.
After 18 months of intensive study and analysis of the NFT market, the partnership between Bundesliga International and Sorare comes to an end. It will be able to watch the market as it matures as it chooses to go for a short-term deal. Robert Klein, the Bundesliga's chief executive, said this during the Sports Business NFT Webinar.
The platform will sell digital cards of players in Bundesliga and 2 as a result of its partnership with Sorare. By the time the two-year deal ends, Klein expects that there will be more information available, and the league will be able to explore the best commercial model by the time the two-year deal ends.
In addition to inking a new deal with Sorare, Bundesliga also upgraded its deal for physical collectibles with Topps to include digital trading cards.
Topps, which has already established itself in the physical sports collectibles sector, has also ventured into the NFTs and will be releasing digital cards of players and highlights throughout the season.
This is not the first partnership between the NFT space and the sporting world. The deal was later cancelled due to the deal being announced by FC Barcelona with a NFT marketplace.