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Manchester United Football Club have launched digital trading cards (NFTs) and a fantasy game, Fantasy United, in which the player cards can be used.

For the 2024/25 season, Manchester United supporters can begin collecting the trading cards, which feature all first-team players from the men’s squad.

The cards come in three rarities; Classic, Rare and Ultra-rare and will be dynamically updated with real-time stats throughout the season.

The cards can be used to build a five-a-side team to earn points in Fantasy United, which is claimed to be a first of its kind created by an English Premier League team.

Supporters will have the chance to go head-to-head against former Manchester United players in their legends league and create their own mini-leagues to play against friends. Prizes and experiences can be won by fans performing well.

Early access was granted to Red Devil NFT holders, one of Manchester United’s first digital collectible editions, with the public launch happening days after on the 31st of July 2024.

The Player Trading Cards are sold in packs of seven for £3 per pack and are built on the Tezos blockchain, Manchester United’s Web3 partner.

So far, there have been almost 13,000 packs sold meaning 90,258 cards in circulation.

Ronan Joyce, Director of Digital Innovation at Manchester United said:

Sunil Singhvi, head of culture at Trilitech, Tezos R&D Hub, added:

Fantasy United’s experience is fairly seamless compared to many branded Web3 experiences.

Supporters can sign in with their own Tezos wallet, or via social log-in.

In the example above we created an account via Google, and then entered our email to receive updates about the game.

Buying packs is equally simple. You can do this using any credit/debit card (via stripe integration).

Once the pack is bought, you can open it to reveal your player cards.

Creating a fantasy team will be familiar to fans who have played any fantasy game. It is easy to select players for specific positions and then save your team.

Overall, there has been a concerted effort here to make the user experience as easy as possible, abstracting the blockchain element as much as possible.

Manchester United have shown themselves to be one of the most mature teams in football in terms of their Web3 strategy.

Chronological view of their journey:

Detailed view:

The club began their Web3 journey by creating a Discord community for fans, and then introduced a free digital collectible mint, first allocating 50,000 ‘key’ NFTs to this early Discord community and contributors before going to the public. They ended up having 750,000 NFT claims in total for their free drop.

The keys had three categories of rarity, each with their respective perks acting as gateways to exclusive merchandise, drops and private discord channels.

The activity seen during the free NFT claim was huge for Tezos, with the blockchain seeing 6 times its usual activity, during this campaign. The spike in December 2022 on the right-hand side of the graph below was an all-time high for the Tezos blockchain in terms of contract interactions, at the time.

The next phase was a paid drop, with 7,777 ‘Devils’ NFTs.

Each of the 7,777 Devils in the collection is unique, costing £30 each and fans were able to unlock a series of rewards that included:

The devils were reserved first for those who were early to the project and had minted the free key drop, with the highest rarity holders getting first refusal.

Manchester United’s next Web3 activation was Collect United.

For the 23/24 football season, 48 hours ahead of each home fixture for the men's and women’s Manchester United teams — a new collectible was available for Manchester United fans to claim for free.

This came with the chance to win exclusive prizes for those who completed a set.

They saw almost 1 million claims of these free collectibles throughout the season.

Then came gamification.

This year rather than focusing on free collectibles, Manchester United turned their attention to Fantasy United, attempting to create a more dynamic and involved Web3-based proposition, as explored earlier in the piece.

Manchester United have seen great scale in their Web3 activations, as you would expect from a team with this brand and size.

They have funnelled much of this excitement and enthusiasm into a large digital community on Discord with over 100,000 members, making it one of the largest football team Discords globally. The Discord was launched before their first ‘Keys’ NFT collection and has been a cornerstone of their communication and growth.

The Fantasy United concept is an interesting evolution for the club.

So far, their success has mostly been seen in free-to-claim digital collectibles, whereas this proposition comes with the added friction of a transaction.

The success here will be determined by the club’s internal KPIs, but considering the £3 price point, presumably, this is not something designed to drive strong revenues.

Therefore, whilst it shows innovation, will it only engage hardcore Manchester United fans who are also into digital collectibles? And if so, what is the total addressable market for that audience?

In April 2024 we covered the French Professional Football League creating a Web3 fantasy game and I wrote:

Additionally, I feel there are barriers to Web3 propositions like this that there are not in Web2 equivalents. This normally means that these propositions have to be unique, flawless, extremely fun or perhaps offer some sort of financial return.

If we consider these friction points as part of a Web3 fantasy proposition like this:

You can imagine that each friction point creates some attrition to some degree, and therefore is difficult to maintain levels of enthusiasm in a proposition like Fantasy United.

On the other hand, Manchester United have one of the biggest fanbases in world football, if not the biggest. If there is a team that can get over these friction points, it’s them. Their Discord community being the size that it is, with the existing on chain audience they have, gives them as great a chance as anyone to make it a success.

There is the added benefit of not needing a huge ‘return’ on the investment of IP rights, because this is designed and developed in tandem with Tezos, and the legacy deal is still one that reflects the lofty sponsorship heights of the previous crypto market cycle. This isn’t like the LPF example, a PE firm or something adjacent to it looking to fatten margins in digital activations.

As I wrote at the time:

The dilution with the increase of gamified experiences, both Web3 and Web2 for Manchester United fans still has this cannibalising effect. But the club surely recognise that simultaneous to this, they have one of the biggest brands in football globally and need to engage the 99.99% of fans outside of those who go to Old Trafford every week.

Fantasy United could become a big part of Manchester United’s digital strategy, or remain a niche proposition for superfans within that larger digital cohort. Whether that is a success or not, depends on the team’s goals internally.

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