FIFA Want to Launch a Blockchain

FIFA's Blockchain ⛓️ 

FIFA has announced plans to develop and launch its own proprietary blockchain, moving away from partnerships with existing blockchain providers. It will be a new EVM-compatible infrastructure “enabling new product features, performance improvements, and long-term growth”.

The new network will host FIFA’s NFT collection initially minted on Algorand and expanded to Polygon. The migration will begin no earlier than May 20th.

It will, according to FIFA Collect’s FAQs, “support new experiences, enable wallet compatibility, and provide stronger foundations for future innovation”.

FIFA's Web3 Journey So Far 📊 

FIFA’s Web3 journey began in 2022 when they partnered with Algorand as their official blockchain partner before the Qatar World Cup, likely, by my estimations, to the tune of low-to-mid 8-figure dollars per year. This was followed by the launch of "FIFA+ Collect," a digital collectibles platform built on the Algorand blockchain.

The platform did well, with some impressive stats at the time:
 
➡️ 𝟮 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻+ 𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗸𝘀 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗱
➡️ 𝟳𝟬,𝟬𝟬𝟬+ 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗱𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀
➡️ $𝟭𝟵𝗺+ 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗼𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝗺𝗲
 
Before the turn of the year in late December 2023, FIFA announced that they were partnering with layer 2 Ethereum blockchain solution Polygon to launch NFTs during the Club World Cup 2023.

Publications originally reported that the “project had moved to Polygon”, but FIFA later clarified this as an “expansion”.

At this time, they also employed a tech company by the name of Modex to take over the proposition, and their first move in the collaboration was to launch a dual collectible for the FIFA Club World Cup that took place late last year.

Fast forward to November 2024, FIFA announced FIFA Rivals, by Mythical Games, the company behind the hit blockchain game NFL Rivals. It is expected to launch in summer 2025, and is the first game license that FIFA has issued since their divorce from EA.

And most recently, in March 2025, FIFA President Gianni Infantino was at the White House Crypto Summit with Donald Trump, where they discussed ‘FIFA Coin’.

To summarise FIFA’s Web3 Journey so far:

• May 2022: Signed a partnership with Algorand to become their blockchain partner

• October 2022: Launched digital collectible packs during the 2022 World Cup via their FIFA+ Collect, on Algorand

• December 2023: Collaborated with Tech firm Modex to take over the FIFA+ Collect platform, and dropped 900 NFTs on OpenSea on the Polygon Layer 2 blockchain in December 2023

• November 2024: FIFA and Mythical Games announce FIFA Rivals

• March 2025: Gianni Infantino teases ‘FIFA Coin’ at Donald Trump’s White House Summit

The Context 🏆️ 

FIFA, like any rights holder in soccer, especially federations, drives most of their revenue from broadcast.

They are a unicorn in the sense that they were able to extract huge revenues from gaming licenses (with EA) and mega sponsorship dollars from the biggest brands on the planet. The novelty of the 4-year cycle and viewing figures meant there are huge premiums involved.

In almost all of these instances, these are licensing deals.

FIFA are licensing to broadcasters.

They previously licensed gaming rights to EA.

They license some sort of gaming license to Mythical Games.

So this model, until now, has worked tremendously to drive revenue to FIFA.

But I think this model is showing cracks.

People can argue we've been here before BUT:

1) 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗗𝗔𝗭𝗡 & 𝗟𝗶𝗴𝘂𝗲𝟭 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗲 for football and broadcast (generally, premium property will always drive big dollars but we are talking about France's top league here!).

2) The divorce from EA was ugly, and they're both worse for it.

FIFA have a revenue hole. EA's latest earnings were not particularly impressive.

FIFA got greedy, asking for too much money, and EA called their bluff.

Now, both parties are hurting.

3) 𝗙𝗜𝗙𝗔 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵... 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘀

FIFA signed a €𝟭𝗯𝗻 rights deal with DAZN for the FIFA Club World Cup.

This is a competition that doesn't have any legacy, and FIFA have tried to platform for the last several years unsuccessfully.

The rights were unsold until DAZN made a huge bid, off the back of Saudi investment in the company to the tune of... €𝟭𝗯𝗻. Of course, soon thereafter, Saudi Arabia were announced (uncontested) the winners of the 2034 Men's World Cup Hosting Rights.

So rights holders in sport, FIFA included, want to diversify their revenue. The broadcast goose is still laying golden eggs for now, but there are signs that it could slow down.

Blockchain may be a route that helps diversify that revenue, but there are already countless examples where the sports industry has got this wrong.

Building an Enterprise Blockchain 🔗

Over the last two years, we have seen a trend emerge of enterprises launching their own blockchains.

Crypto giant Coinbase run and operate Base, a layer 2 blockchain solution on Ethereum.

Kraken, another crypto exchange, have their own layer 2 Ink.

DeFi protocol Uniswap announced UNI, earlier this year.

In December 2024, Deutsche Bank announced they were developing a layer 2 solution.

Sony have launched Soneium, their own layer 2 solution.

In other ecosystems, Polkadot, Avalanche, Cosmos and others all allow for projects or companies to create their networks on top of their existing infrastructure.

In sport, Karate Combat recently announced UP, a scaling solution built on top of the Hedera Network.

One of the reasons we are seeing a proliferation of enterprise-owned blockchain stacks is because the cost of launching these networks has dropped significantly.

As per Jason Yanowitz last year, the cost of deploying this technology has dropped, and will drop even more over the next 5 years.

So why would anyone do this, rather than using existing networks?

(1) To accrue more revenue. Rather than paying network fees, you earn network fees.

(2) To create a more composable tech stack to meet your specific needs — finance, gaming, etc.

FIFA want to do this for commercial purposes, there is no doubt in my mind about that.

But simply launching a blockchain does not guarantee revenues. You need an ecosystem, developers, activity and more to drive fees, which drive revenue.

And on top of that, launching a token is difficult, and riddled with compliance and economic issues that even the most experienced and battle-tested talent in crypto have trouble with. The likelihood of FIFA doing this successfully is low.

Analysis & Concluding Thoughts 🧠

If you look at all the businesses that have created their own infrastructure in this space, they are:

(1) Crypto companies

(2) Tech companies

or

(3) Finance companies

They are looking to leverage their expertise to own a stack that can benefit them, from a revenue and a composability perspective. Not all of them will be successful, but they are at least set up to potentially be successful.

In my opinion, a business like FIFA, that has focused on licensing and sponsorships as their main revenue generation for decades, is not well equipped to launch their own blockchain.

Additionally, having a token breeds a certain amount of risk. From a retail perspective, your fans are no longer just paying for tickets to get into stadiums. They own a token to your infrastructure, and if that goes down in price, that double jeopardy could be painful for FIFA, and it's not something they would have experienced before.

The main question I have is… where will the ecosystem come from?

To me, FIFA do not have fans. They are fans of football, teams, leagues and athletes. FIFA are the federation, and that is a crucial differentiation. So, from a retail perspective, creating a recurring feedback loop for a federation that only has relevance for fans once every four years is incredibly difficult.

You also have to ask the question… who are the businesses or people in this ecosystem that are contributing to the FIFA blockchain?

If we go back to FIFA's original model of licensing and partnering, they have already proven that with Mythical Games, for example, they have a recipe for potential success.

FIFA Rivals is likely to be very, very successful, like NFL Rivals has been.

FIFA can partner their way into gaining revenue and having success by leveraging this technology tangentially rather than directly.

Getting businesses to operate nodes, create staking services, custody assets and more — this is all so alien to a company like FIFA. I think there is a gross underestimation on what it takes to run a blockchain.

As I’ve written before, they should look at this in another way, rather than the commercial direction I believe they will take.

They should be thinking about efficiency, governance and automation via smart contracts rather than fee generation and commercials (which again, is the direction I’m guessing they will go).

What I would do if I were FIFA?

If we take the approach that this technology is going to be used to disrupt business models, increase efficiency, transparency and more, all whilst regulations are coming into place, let’s explore what that model could look like for FIFA.

I’ve created a graphic that showcases how FIFA could use blockchain.

(1) Governance layer

FIFA is run much like most governments. Each participating nation has a vote at a yearly congress, and there is a FIFA Executive Committee chaired by the president. The presidency is a 4-year term, and presidents can be re-elected for up to 3 terms in total.

Now, the governance layer having some form of tamper and fraud-proof onchain voting, perhaps governed by a non-tradeable FIFA token ($FIFA?), could be interesting.

More transparent, efficient and gives members and fans peace of mind that voting is legitimate.

(2) Infrastructure Layer

The blockchain itself.

(3) Settlement Layer

B2B payments are hard. But put into the equation, Players, Agents, FIFPRO (Players’ Association), Clubs, National Teams and Public Good Funding — it’s a miracle that anything gets done in football.

Stablecoins now allow for near-instant, low-fee, global payments. They can also be transparent and made programmable.

For example, every time a player is bought or sold and then registered to a new club, they have to be registered in FIFA’s Transfer Matching System (TMS). Right now, this is a multi-step process:

• A fee is agreed between two teams

• Payment sent

• Payment received

• Buying club registers on TMS

• Selling club registers on TMS

• Any sell-on fees to the previous club are made

• Any solidarity payments (payments made to clubs that trained the player in their youth, up to 5% at times and proportionately distributed).

There is an onchain version of this where the payment is executed via a smart contract that automates the registration upon settlement of funds.

We’re talking about money acting like software now, and that is only possible because of blockchain.

(4) Onchain Credentials

This is a big one.

I once spoke to a sporting director of a top-tier French team who told me that he is sometimes sent video clips of players on WhatsApp by agents of players looking to move from anywhere in the world, to the club he worked for.

The issue was that sometimes:

• He didn’t know if this was actually the player’s agent, and on multiple occasions had different people claiming to be the same player’s agent.

• The videos are often low-res, pixelated, and not authenticated. Are all the clips this player? In the age of AI, can I trust that this footage hasn’t been doctored?

• He would agree on deals with players and clubs, but then find out their entourage are also due to receive payment.

• Does the agent have the required licenses to act on the player’s behalf?

• Sometimes, in certain continents, a player’s rights are owned by multiple parties… but he would deal with only one of those parties until very late in the deal.

• In rare cases, he would wait for the player’s ages to be proved via a birth certificate if the player was not at an established club.

The solution for this is a form of onchain credentials that can create transparency and trust for all parties involved in transactions like this.

Most of the issues above go away if you can have a provable identity and credentials that both parties can see.

To conclude, the case for blockchain here is obvious, but not the way FIFA is likely thinking about it.

I believe FIFA are thinking about a blockchain with a public token, which won’t look like my proposed use case for the technology.

We’ve seen FIFA talk about FIFA Coin. And we’re now hearing that they will launch a blockchain.

I hope that this is a permissioned ecosystem, focusing on the governance of federation members, that helps the world of football modernise its ancient operational and technical stack, rather than simply launching an infrastructure layer for the sake of it with a token attached.

I hope I’m wrong, because the potential here is big and obvious.

More Sports & Web3 Stories

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• Flow’s Web3 Ecosystem Still Sports-Heavy, But Gaming Is Picking Up Steam (Read more here)

• Animoca Hasn’t Ruled Out US IPO Listing, Yat Siu Says There Is a ‘Possibility’ (Read more here)

General ‘Stuff’ that Could Impact You

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• 'MapleStory N' Game Launches on Avalanche (Read more here)

• Lyft Taps Solana-Powered Hivemapper for Decentralized Mapping Data (Read more here)

• JP Morgan Settles First Tokenized Treasury Transaction on Public Blockchain (Read more here)

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