French Professional Football (LPF) to Launch NFT Fantasy Game 'Coach Ligue 1'

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Introduction

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Gaming and Web3 have gone hand in hand when people try to explain how this technology can impact the future of the internet and how it may evolve digital experiences for consumers.

“Imagine an in-game item, but you can own it, and transfer it to another game!”

And yet, we haven’t seen true breakout Web3 gaming moments that captivate 10s of millions of gamers.

What we have seen however over the past 4-5 years is the spectrum of Web3 gaming being clarified.

Games that are run and developed in a decentralised way, with a tradeable token — to games that simply use NFTs as a growth tool and to reward and engage superusers. We’ve also seen Web3 fantasy gaming and mobile gaming develop more mature ecosystems, however small and niche they are compared to the broader ‘Web2’ gaming and fantasy worlds.

In this newsletter edition, Sporting Crypto looks at LFP Media creating a Web3 fantasy game for the top two professional football leagues in France; Ligue 1 and 2, called Coach Ligue 1.

Discussed:

💳 ‘Coach Ligue 1’ overview🎮Where does Web3 gaming fit into Sports? 🧠Concluding Thoughts & Analysis

LFP 💳 ‘Coach Ligue 1’ overview

France’s Professional Football League (LFP), via subsidiary LFP Media, will develop and operate its own NFT fantasy game. This is seen as a first in world football and will be created in partnership with Socios creators Chiliz, and fantasy NFT gaming studio Unagi.

LFP Media is a new subsidiary of LFP, created in conjunction with private equity company CVC capital partners who took a €1.5 billion stake in the new vehicle that manages and distributes LFP’s commercial rights. The subsidiary is valued at an initial value of €11.5 billion after a cash injection of €10 billion by LFP themselves.

The platform, ‘Coach Ligue 1’ will let fans of the top two tiers in French football (Ligue 1 Uber Eats and Ligue 2 BKT) collect and trade digital cards to create weekly teams and to compete in fantasy leagues.

There will be five levels of card rarity — Espoir, Pro, International, Champion and Legend.

The platform was developed with Unagi, a Web3 Fantasy game studio best known for their fantasy product Ultimate Champions, who readers may remember struck an agreement with English football giants Arsenal in May 2022.

Over the last 12 months, the Ultimate Champions platform has seen between 3,000 - 13,000 daily transactions.

In February 2023 the Paris-founded platform raised a $5m Seed Round. One of their Co-founders Charlie Guilemot, is notably the son of Ubisoft co-founder Yver Guilemot, and Charlie himself had worked at Ubisoft after his free-to-play studio Owlient was acquired by the gaming giant. At the time of the raise, Unagi had inked deals with 45 football clubs in Europe. The platform has a native token $CHAMP, which is down ~80% over the last 12 months.

Coach Ligue 1 will be built on the Chiliz Blockchain, Chiliz of course best known for their fan token platform Socios.

💬Some quotes:

Jérôme Cazadieu, senior marketing director and editorial director of LFP Media:

Martin Jaglin, digital growth director at the media unit, added: 

Mon Petit Gazon (MPG), name-checked in the quote above, is a fantasy game for French professional football, that was acquired by LFP media outright ~ 18 months ago. Martin Jaglin, quoted above, was one of the co-founders, who is now a firm part of the digital unit of LFP media.

🎮Where does Web3 gaming fit into Sports?

Web3 gaming has made a bit of a comeback this year, that a variety of stats can back up. Parallel Studios for example recently raised a $35m funding round, and the likes of Illuvium and Gunzilla Games have raised rounds of $12m and $30m respectively in the last few weeks alone.

The On-Chain metrics (H/T Decentralised) have also recovered and surpassed previous highs.

From the same piece that the graph is taken from:

Yet, this is still a market that is searching for sustainable user numbers, generally speaking.

In October 2023, Footprint Analytics reported that 73.1% of 2,651 Web3 games analysed had fewer than 10 users in October — raising concerns about the sustainability or dilution of the market.

Translation: Too many games, too few users. 

This comes against a backdrop of the broader gaming market struggling, which saw more than one-third of video game developers impacted by layoffs in 2023.

In the first two months of 2024 alone, 7,800 jobs were lost — including ~2000 employees who were laid off by Activision, now owned by Microsoft.

The gaming market has, in other words, found its ‘top’ and is going through a contraction.

Of course, the Covid pandemic had a profound impact on this, but many analysts say it has only accelerated what would already have happened even without the generational black swan event.

With all this context in mind, it’s wise to shift our context to where Web3 Gaming specifically has impacted sports. 

Sorare and DraftKings, for example, have both seen success with their NFT fantasy products respectively.

Like much of the NFT market, Sorare’s monthly sales volumes peaked, seeing $40m+ (Source: Cryptoslam) in monthly sales volume for February 2022. At present, the last 12 months have seen the monthly sales volume for Sorare fluctuate between ~$8.7m - ~$17m. This is a reduction from peak market numbers but an outperformance of the rest of the NFT market comparatively in the same period.

DraftKings Reignmakers, the NFT fantasy product by DraftKings, saw monthly sales volumes of $21m+ in September 2023 in the run-up and start of the NFL 2023 season. In March 2024, during the off-season, they had sales volumes of almost $5m — which is still healthy for a product that only launched in February 2023.

Aside from the fantasy sub-division of Web3 gaming in sports, there have been breakouts in other categories — most notably NFL Rivals in the mobile gaming space. The game has seen over 3m downloads and doesn't require the use of NFTs. Instead, they have converted a small but loyal audience of buyers, seeing monthly transactions hit 30,000 from Sept 2023 to March 2024. In Q1 2024, they have seen sales of ~$1.5m. 

Even NBA TopShot, the OG of this intersection, has turned to gamified experiences to engage their audience with their quasi-fantasy game Fast Break. 

Gaming and gamification seems to be an area that is of great interest to anyone working on anything to do with sports or Web3, and the intersection of the two.

🧠Concluding Thoughts & Analysis

When you look at the active participants within the Web3 ecosystem, particularly within Web3 gaming and even in the subdivision of Web3 fantasy sports, I do think:

Is the pie being sliced too thin? 

and

Is there a dilution of fan/consumer experience happening?

Of course, from a commercial perspective, the job of a commercial arm is to slice rights as thin as possible to maximise revenue.

From the perspective of Coach Ligue 1, the French football leagues already have a deal in place with the Web3 fantasy game Sorare that no doubt drives revenue for them. They also now have their fantasy offering MPG. So does this new offering in Coach Ligue 1 dilute those experiences, or even dampen the potential revenues from those products respectively?

From the description of the game, it sounds very much like a Sorare-type game, and it will be interesting to see the conversion that LFP media sees from the French Web3 fantasy giant, and also from their MPG itself.

🧱The barriers

When designing a Web3 proposition like Coach Ligue 1, several things need to happen before there is good traction.

1. Firstly, NFTs need to be sold

2. Then, you need to get those who hold the NFTs to enter teams

3. You then need to get those players to return weekly

4. You need to continually sell NFTs to drive revenue

5. You need to surprise and delight those users regardless of how many NFTs are sold

The barriers to creating a successful Web3 proposition are not too different to that of any Web2-based, fan engagement proposition but there is a key distinction, the 5th point above; Most will base the development of your proposition on selling a certain number of NFTs, but if you only sell 10% of them, let's say 1000 instead of 10,000, you still have to deliver to those 1000 buyers.

The game still has to run if there are 1000 or 10,000 users.

This can put teams in a difficult position if there is no growth, and to get to the position of regular, active users requires NFT sales, using those NFTs and getting fans to use those NFTS regularly. It’s very difficult.

Compare this to Reddit’s Collectible Avatar proposition which has been the most successful mainstream NFT case study from an enterprise brand— the mainstreaming is largely down to users only needing to do one thing: Buy an NFT and make it your profile avatar. Readers might be screaming “Utility!”, but the more complex your offering is, and the more layers there are to the ‘Utility’ in question, the more difficult it is to get traction that is worthwhile. The balancing act is, as mentioned before, very difficult.

If we consider the fact that LFP Media has PE money swirling in it, at a huge valuation, there will be pressure to monetise every aspect of the rights they have acquired with their investment. If I had to guess, this will signal that Coach Ligue 1 will try and be a direct revenue driver, or attempt to get higher spending Web3 wallets into the top of their digital funnel to spend money in other digital channels.

There is of course an emphasis in Sports from everyone to try and lower the average age of your fans and to acquire digitally native fans that are global. But just how many fans will use this proposition remains to be seen.

On one hand, PE investment and the view that Sports, as an industry is bad at commercialising beyond broadcast, will drive huge experimentation over the next decade to seek out global audiences and attempt to create more revenue lines. On the other hand, how do a league-owned Web3 fantasy game, a league-owned non-Web3 fantasy game, and a licensed Web3 fantasy game (Sorare) all coexist?

I don’t know the answer but we’re going to find out in the coming years.

The dilution with the increase of gamified experiences, both Web3 and Web2 for fans will in the short term no doubt have cannibalising effects on each other. And how that pans out, is anyone’s guess.

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