OneFootball Launch Web3 Loyalty Program - OneFootball Club

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To the next three years!

What is OneFootball Club? ⚽️ 

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.

Onboarding — .Football ID 📱 

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

1. After downloading and signing up to OneFootball, users are prompted to click the ‘Claim your .Football ID’ button.

2. You are then prompted to create your Football ID and check if it is available.

3. After finding an available Football ID, you can claim it.

4. As easy as that, your Football ID is registered.

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.

Quotes from the Creators 💬 

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.

Analysis & Concluding Thoughts 🧠

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?