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Before we get stuck into the proposition itself, OneFootball Club, let’s give the uninitiated an overview of OneFootball.

They’re a media company in football (soccer) serving over 200 million people monthly through their news, content and streaming platform that is primarily mobile-based. It’s like an all-in-one fan hub if you’re a football fan. Think Bleacher Report x YouTube for Football x Streaming.

They first made headlines in the Web3 space when they raised an eyewatering $300m in April 2022 in a Series D round led by Liberty City Ventures, with involvement from Dapper Labs and Animoca Brands. This saw the launch of OneFootball Labs and the AERA NFT platform. Just over a year later, the AERA NFT platform was shut down, one week after their then-CEO and Co-Founder stepped down, amid a majorly depressed NFT market. It led to OneFootball downsizing their entire business significantly — and was viewed broadly as a spectacular failure, with their trajectory accurately reflecting the boom and bust nature of the overall crypto market. The timing and the lack of conversion of their huge user base (OneFootball boasted 170m users in May 2023) — which saw only 50,000 users buy the NFTs themselves — was in the end fatal. There were also reports that OneFootball had missed payment deadlines for specific rights they had purchased — or in some cases not executed those right buys. For example, the German Bundesliga had sold NFT rights to OneFootball, but the NFT product was never shipped.

In the end, OneFootball issued refunds to the ~50,000 buyers of the NFTs they had launched. Their company statement said: “We have not found a route through – one that is commercially viable for OneFootball and our partners” — which is a frank, honest and accurate statement of what entailed at OneFootball following their monster Series D round.

Just over a year from then, we have a Phoenix from those ashes, with OneFootball launching OneFootball Club (OFC) — a digital proposition that rewards football fans for their passion and engagement. Fans can join the OFC to earn XP, badges, and rewards by interacting with the OneFootball app, gamifying their experience. It is built on Base in partnership with Animoca Brands and has been rolled out to fans in Italy and the UK to start with. Fans can also claim their own '.Football ID’ - as part of creating a profile on OFC.

The onboarding process and creation of the .Football ID is very simple.

Whilst not currently apparent how much of the proposition will live onchain, there has been a token teased — BALLS — which can currently be accumulated by playing mini-games, sharing announcements and more. It’s worth highlighting once again that the OFC is not a separate app from OneFootball, as we’ve seen with most brands when it comes to their Web3 loyalty solutions — Starbucks, Nike and Lufthansa for example. OneFootball have decided to directly integrate OneFootball Club into their existing app with their existing user base.

In a press release, Patric Fischer — CEO of OneFootball said:

Vincent Schalk, GM of Loyalty & Subscription went on to say:

Like Reddit, OneFootball are integrating Web3 rails into their native ecosystem, where their users already are.

OneFootball have had a turbulent couple of years, especially when it comes to Web3, so it’s commendable to them that they are continuing down this road — with a strategy that feels stronger than before. They could have very easily reverted to their original business model. Instead, it feels like they’ve gone all-in on this Web3 Loyalty proposition.

So where does this strategy fit within the overall current context of brands in Web3?

This is the buzzword that has been used a lot by marketers, strategists, and those at the forefront of creating propositions within enterprise brands that include some form of blockchain technology, and it makes total sense.

If you think about the world becoming more digitally native and globalised — the way you interact with consumers or fans changes. Inherently, because of this, your target market is larger and has a more varied demographic.

And I think there was a real belief that blockchain could help here, especially when it comes to creating value, scarcity and levelling up distribution power through digital goods. The issue is that most of these programs centred themselves completely around digital assets in the form of NFTs, and where I think they failed, is by creating business models that were not sustainable and focusing too much on NFTs being the product and not simply a feature. It was surprising to me that 18 to 24 months ago, so many agencies, vendors and strategists started focusing their attention on trying to develop propositions like this. Suddenly there were so many picks and shovels, but no miners.

Even when the products were close to flawless like Starbucks Odyssey (quick plug for our research report) the product itself sold NFTs. That’s what it was from a 20,000-foot view. Of course, there were engagement mechanisms and gamification, but the business model was focused on selling NFTs.

On top of this, the approach here was siloed — like it has been for many brands — in creating a ‘side app’ for the Web3 proposition. This makes sense to some extent. You don’t want to expose your entire, mammoth-sized audience to something new and scary, so you experiment with a pocket of early users. But if we look at the most successful proposition by a brand in Web3, Reddit’s Collectible Avatars, they did the opposite of this approach. It saw wild success, and although was not a core function for Reddit, was a game-changer for users and was across the entire Reddit ecosystem. This was not because it was the most fascinating, amazing proposition that you've ever seen that uses blockchain rails — it was simply because they went to where their audience already was. They created something compelling enough that users on Reddit went and claimed NFTs and personalised their profiles with them, and they didn’t have to leave the platform they use every day.

I like this approach from OneFootball in the sense that they are similarly going to where their fans already are. On the other hand, this is a very all-in approach for their business. It's a business that has had a tough couple of years, and whilst the payoff here could be great, it is also risky to instil blockchain rails across the entire OneFootball ecosystem.

Where I think there is huge potential here is on the onchain identification layer of OneFootball’s approach.

Where sports has a huge issue, generally speaking, is that the industry doesn’t know its fans well enough. Technology stacks have not evolved fast enough to match the globalisation of fanbases within sports. Some teams and leagues don't even have CRMs, and the data they have of their fans is coming from siloed, rented audiences such as social media, video platforms or search engines.

.Football ID, could be a very interesting proposition in trying to create a less fragmented approach to fandom in football.

Vincent Schalk gave us an exclusive quote on why he thinks this can be powerful:

The other side of this is this will require connecting a lot of digital tissue. What I mean by this is it is very difficult to incentivise third parties to give up some of the data that can connect to an onchain identification layer like .Football ID.

What is the commercial model there that allows, a rights holder and OneFootball to create an (to some extent) open network that drives value to all three parties; platform, team and fan?

Where the proposition is at its weakest is the potential of a token within this ecosystem. This is not isolated to OneFootball as an issue, it is synonymous with anything consumer-facing in crypto.

There are four key issues with tokens in consumer-facing crypto propositions:

These four issues make it incredibly difficult to create a sustainable tokenised economy for any game or application.

Below are the biggest gaming tokens in the industry, charted since March 2024, which highlights these issues.

It's not impossible to create a functional tokenised ecosystem for fans or users, but we just haven't many good examples of it yet.

I don't think we've seen a good example of tokens that:

Create a sustainable, strong proposition that just works.

This will be the key hurdle for OneFootball to clear. I’m curious to see how they develop a strategy that combats the potential pitfalls of tokenisation in crypto consumer propositions if they do indeed launch a token.

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