Sporting Crypto - Sept 13th 2021 - Sorare & La Liga Partner, Rookies & Wtf is Sploot

Welcome to the first-ever edition of the Sporting Crypto weekly newsletter. I've had this idea of writing about the intersection of Sports and Crypto for a while but have never really found a good time to start it.

Yep, another guy doing a Crypto-ish newsletter, I get it. I can already hear the yawns.

The reality is Crypto is no longer a niche. So obviously, finding something more niche - such as the venn diagram where Crypto and Sports meet - was necessary.

The format of this is going to be quite simple.

• Big stories of the week: This is where I’ll summarise and analyse the biggest stories in Crypto Sports

• Learnings: Deep dive into a Crypto moment, recent or deep in the past, that the sporting world can learn from

• Cool things happening: Sports-related or not, things that make you think

• Reading & Tweets of the week: Articles, newsletters, Twitter threads, tweets and more that

If you don’t know me, my name is Pet and by day I’m the Head of Crypto Media at COPA90. By night I create content in Football, Crypto and Financial services with and for brands and more recently DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations). I’m an award-winning podcast creator and am currently producing a podcast on the history and future of NFTs which will be available soon!

Big stories of the week

1) -La Liga Join Sorare in Multi-Year Exclusive Deal - 

The StoryGlobal Fantasy Blockchain game Sorare (mandatory plugging of the signup link here) which allows you to buy and trade NFT player cards and use them to play in fantasy games, has inked a deal with La Liga. It’s an exclusive long term deal and it marks a huge step for the brand as this is the first top league in the world to sign a deal of this magnitude.The French-based company, which is backed by footballers Pique and Griezmann, is also rumoured to be raising $500m at a valuation of almost $4bn, which is…a lot of money. This isn’t a huge surprise. After all, La Liga announced their own NFTs with the help of Dapper labs. On top of that, some La Liga teams have already engaged with Socios the tokenised fan engagement company. Cynics and pessimists would say that La Liga and La Liga clubs are broke and NFTs and Crypto are an easy way for them to give themselves some commercial breathing room. Just look at the Messi contract mess (sorry, I really am) and Madrid President Fiorentino President’s claims that there is no way clubs can continue to be sustained in the way that they are (of course, this type of broke leads one to bid ~€ 200m on Mbappe…).The other side of this is that clubs and football entities are realising a few things when it comes to partnerships like this and NFTs more broadly:- Covid means you have to engage globally, in a digital manner, beyond the 90 minutes- This truly is a new way to market your brand- They can extend the length of relationships in a digitally native waySorare have been an incredible success, selling ~ $130m worth of NFTs this year. This is an incredible step in their trajectory as a business signing the second biggest football league up to a multi-year deal. ThoughtsOne thing that maybe isn’t clicking with people yet RE: NFTs is that these aren’t just JPEGs. On Sorare, your cards are used in fantasy games where you win more ETH or more cards dependent on where you place. You can also buy players and trade them for more (or less) than you bought for, which creates this awesome dynamic. Taking it a step further, Sorare - alongside many others - are trying to build this bridge between the physical and digital.

This special edition Gerard Pique Sorare card grants the owner an all-expenses paid trip to El Clasico. Pretty amazing. This is what I mean by the extension of a relationship with footballers, football clubs and football in general through NFTs. In a piece I wrote recently for City AM I talked about how boundless the experiences, digital and physical, of NFTs are.I wrote:“Imagine if you went to the 2005 Champions League final in which Liverpool came from 3-0 down to beat AC Milan. That ticket stub is important, has sentimental value and if you tried to sell it someone would likely buy it from you. 

Now imagine that the ticket itself is an NFT. Something you own in your digital wallet forever. How can clubs think about activating that moment and memory beyond the game? 

In six months’ time, could you as the owner of that NFT be airdropped a token which grants you a free pint at Anfield? On the two-year anniversary of the game, could you be airdropped a token that gives you access to a token-gated digital Q&A with Steven Gerrard? The opportunities here alone are endless.”It’s an interesting thing to think about. Suddenly this Pique card isn’t just a JPEG. And it’s not just a card you can use in a weekly fantasy tournament. It’s suddenly a key in the physical world. Perhaps in 3 months that NFT holder is presented with further experiences; a token gated Q&A with Pique, a lunch with Shakira. You get the picture by now. NFTs can be (and probably will become) everything and anything.

2) -Rookie League NFTs Launch-The StoryI really think this is cool. Very similar to the loot concept in NFT land, but for sports rookies.

As you can see above, these rookies are nameless and have 8 stats; 4 physical and 4 mental. They also have height and weight, which both have 5 categories - some quite quirky like ‘whale’ or ‘feather’. If you’re reading this and are new to NFTs, then you might be thinking “WTF, people have paid money for that?”

The best example I’ve seen is from Shaan Puri. He details his beginner’s journey into NFTs here and it’s pretty insightful. Now that analogy is your base level understanding for Loot, or any project which is inspired or a derivative of that. Currently, when I play FIFA ultimate team, I might actually use real money to buy FUT cards and make my team better. Alternatively, I spend hours playing the game and getting good, to make enough in-game coins to buy these cards. Now, with NFTs and say Sorare for example - I own the cards I buy. And Loot is one step further than this. Instead of going from:- Game created with an in-game economy where no one owns the assets and you only derive pleasure from playing to- A platform created which creates games that you can use NFTs on to earn more NFTs, ETH (Ethereum) and experiences.to- Just create the assets and let people build whatever they want. That’s basically the crux of it. Now let’s think about Rookie. Someone might go and build an auto-generating character that allows you to attach a real look and feel to your character. Someone might build a baseball game in which you need to use your rookies. The limits are set by the community and the creativity of the builders within it. If you head into the Rookie discord, you can see people are already hard at work building things out.

ThoughtsThis is like a hackathon but in real life. These things are being made, bringing together smart people - and building things out at rapid speed. They’re all community-led, and it’s really awesome to see.This is definitely an experiment being carried out in public. Rookies for example might fail and so my Loot. But this notion of creating the card deck first and let them make games is a really pivotal moment in the NFT world. Now and then something of this magnitude happens and you have to stop what you’re doing and spend hours reading until it clicks. But when it clicks, it’s like opening a door in your brain that you thought didn’t exist. Everyone in gaming should be thinking about what’s happened here. And there’s of course a spectrum when it comes to centralisation. One day, Football Manager or NBA 2K may decide to do something similar to what we’ve seen above. But will they make it open source? Better yet - will they just build on top of something existing like Rookies…Again, it’s an experiment, it could die a sweet death - but we’ll look back at the likes of Loot and Rookie as being the precursors for awesome innovation in the space.

3)- Sploot: the Loot for Sports, with some twists - Ah, Sploot. I thought I didn’t have enough time to get involved in something like this to see it grow from 0-100, but like with anything in Crypto, my brain has started to go “but how does this work with Sports?”My brain was whirring. But I was on holiday for a week in Greece and wanted to be off my phone as much as possible.Someone smarter than me had thought about it a lot more, as I detailed in these two tweets:

So I jumped into the Discord and was pretty amazed at just how quickly things move. I say to people that Crypto in general, it’s like inverse dog years - every day is worth like 7. When it comes to helping a community build something like this, every day feels like a month. So much happens, all at the same time, at such high quality, with such pace…it’s extraordinary. Anyways so I’ve jumped into the discord and soon enough lent a helping hand on the brand and marketing side of things, my strengths since I have no developer or game design experience. Here’s the overview from the community’s full concept which you can find here:

So basically imagine building the legos for a sports game (like football manager) that is community-driven where the assets in terms of players, staff and teams are all created as ownable NFTs. There are in-game currencies which fuel these ecosystems, players can be transferred, teams can be sponsored - the lot. And there’s a funny twist. This is really serious but really not at the same time. It’s a parody of real sports but still taken seriously. The idea is to create comedic narratives around these players, teams and so on. Just like fans of Football Manager fall in love with regenerated characters (like Alan Allan-Alan below), people will (hopefully) fall in love with Sploot characters.

ThoughtsI’ve had so many of these conversations with so many different types of people. My friends who have no idea about Crypto, people in the sports world and people in gaming. When it came to NFTs it was; But I can right click and save that as a JPEG?When it comes to Sploot, when I’ve explained it - it’s been; But they’re made up, why do people want to play with them?The answer is simple; it’s a blank canvas. We as humans love making up stories. We’ve done it since we could make noises and draw on caves. Our imaginations are pretty wild if you think about what we’ve created over the last 30,000 years or whatever. Sploot is no different. Alan Allan-Alan might not have the real-life history of the second inform shiny Ibrahimovic I bought on FIFA ultimate team when I was 13, but his story is whatever I want it to be. Allan-Alan could be a chippy by day and footballer in the evening working his way up the English football pyramid. He could have just come out of a messy divorce with 2 kids aged 19, luckily landing himself a trial at a 3rd division Italian club. The value of the connection between player/collector and in-game asset is in the boundless possibilities of the blank canvas. 

Sploot might dwindle into nothingness after the NFTs launch, or it might die a sweet death beforehand (in which case I’ll be proposing to the community we mint NFT tickets to the digital funeral). Either way, I’ve learnt more in this week helping in small ways that I can, than I did at University and my first full-time job combined.

PS…as I was editing this, I saw that someone created a Twitter profile for the first Metaverse Sports Agent:

In this next section, I’ll be taking something in the crypto world - analysing it, and thinking about how the sporting world can take inspiration from it. I haven’t got a name for this section yet, so if you’re more creative than me and think of something better than ‘copycat’, please reach out on Twitter or elsewhere!

Crypto Deep Dive: The Worm

Okay so Digital collectables are one thing, NFT fantasy games another, Loot, Sploot and Rookies have probably confused you a lot - so why not take it a step further since we’ve already gone too far?The Worm is probably the best viral idea I’ve seen in an NFT sense. Everyone should be paying attention to why this is cool.But first, what is the worm? (that’s a sentence I thought I’d never write, especially in a semi-serious newsletter)This is a ‘share to mint’ NFT. There’s only one worm NFT and it looks like this:

At this point, you’re extremely close to switching off, but stay with me - this is one of the most interesting social experiments I’ve seen in Crypto. The idea is to get the worm as far as possible on the Ethereum Blockchain, via users sending it for free from wallet to wallet.What are the incentives to do that? Why wouldn’t I keep the worm and try and sell it?Well firstly, play nice and play the game by the rules.But secondly, when the worm gets to its 100th wallet - those 100 wallets are sent a commemorative worm-related NFT. Everyone who’s been given the worm has a mark on their wallet. Think of it as worm poo, but poo which grants you access to cool things like more NFTs. This cultlike viral thing that was created blew up in the NFT space. People were sending the worm down from person to person…this was truly the first ‘social NFT’. The worm’s pilgrimage ended at wallet 273. The next ‘blessing’ by the ‘Church of the Worm’ would be when the worm hits its 1000th wallet. Why has it ended at 273 you ask? Well, a pesky worm owner has decided to hold him hostage. The worm community were incensed, and someone even offered 1 ETH (~£2500 at the time of writing) to set it free. The captor didn’t budge. One day, maybe the worm will be set free.So why is this important?Well if you’re building an audience, or creating a drop, launching your first NFT - I think there’s something here. Let’s imagine I start a podcast about the worm’s journey. Instead of releasing the episodes in a normal way, I can release them when this social NFT reaches a certain amount of wallets. It’s a direct incentive for my fans and listeners to pass the NFT along in order to unlock more content. Now there could be another layer to this. Let’s say this token reaches 2000 wallets. I decide that everyone who’s had access to that social token is now given an NFT which grants them access to an NFT gated live stream Q&A with me and the first person to receive this social NFT. This is incentivised virality which creates extended relationships between brand and consumer, or creator and fan. The line of work that I’m in means that I’m constantly looking at weird things at this and thinking; is there something here and what can I learn?The learning here is that if you can create a social NFT, with good incentivisation, you can create blockchain virality.I had someone very senior at a very large brand recently ask me; Would you spend 10% of your marketing budget on NFTs?My response was that if you’re smart, you don’t need to spend that much at all.Imagine if Dairy Milk launched 10 social NFTs.When 10,000 wallets have had a dairy milk social NFT in them, they decide to drop all of those wallets a digital ticket to a Dairy Milk factory.

At 25,000 wallets, all of the wallet owners are sent a physical sample of the latest flavour is being developed. At 50,000 wallets - Dairy Milk donate X amount of money to an animal welfare charityAt 100,000 wallets - All the wallet owners are invited to a digital premiere of a Dairy Milk sponsored documentary on the history of chocolate.This is virality, brand equity, activation all in one whilst being at the forefront of this nascent technology. You should probably start thinking about it :)

More big stories

• Crypto.com announce PSG on a multi-year deal: Crytpo.com just don’t stop when it comes to sports partnerships. Serie A and now PSG, as well as listing the PSG fan token on their exchange. I think we’re seeing the next brand when it comes to equity in the football world. Like MasterCard being synonymous with Champions League Football - I think Crypto.com are basically starting on a pathway toward that now.

• NBA franchise UTAH Jazz sell out NFTs within 90 minutes: These 2 tiered NFTs give you access to virtual locker rooms - creating pretty groundbreaking experiences for their fans. This is a really smart first step for a brand as big as the Jazz to take when it comes to this space. Doing something experiential but in a digital way should always be at the forefront of a brand’s thinking when they foray into the NFT world.

• Topps unveil MLB NFTs: Topps have created Major League Baseball NFTs on the Avalanche blockchain. Even the big physical card players cannot keep their eyes and pockets out of this space.

• Steph Curry Joins Crypto Exchange FTX as an Ambassador: Steph Curry, the man who arguably made Under Armour a world-famous brand, is one of the biggest basketballing icons in the game’s history. Jordan, Lebron - Steph is right up there. Why? He’s not that huge or strong or fast and has relied on his best of all time shooting ability, handles and passing to make him into one of the best point guards to ever play the game. So he bought a Bored Ape for about $180,000. He then goes on to become an ambassador to the fastest growing Crypto Exchange in the world, FTX. Anyone got any advice for Steph Curry?

Great reads and great tweeting

• Shaan’s thread - Learning crypto in public: really cool to see someone with this big a profile publicly learning about Crypto. Enjoyed it, a lot.

• The NFL’s Stance on Crypto: The excellent Joe Pompliano talks about the NFLs announcement that no NFL franchise is allowed to sell NFTs

• The Decoupling Cycle - People experiencing Crypto without the Crypto

• I made a Mistake. NFTs are going to be much bigger than I anticipated.Thanks for reading my first ever Sporting Crypto newsletter! If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends who might be interested - and share it on social :)