I’d hoped to be blogging more consistently by the third quarter of 2023, but we play the hand we’re dealt in life and soccer NFT’s are currently holding 7, 2 off-suit as the small stack at the table.

This isn’t me throwing in the towel on soccer NFT’s though, far from it, but I have to be a realist when it comes to where we stand in the middle of year 3 on this endeavor as an industry:

Let’s see if I can give you a short summary of updates since my 2022 year in review article from January:

1. ToppsNFT’s has essentially been closed for the entire six (6) months (we were open for a small window but they still weren’t allowing new account sign-ups) while they work to integrate a new cloud wallet and payment provider. Having already missed a self-imposed deadline of June, the new date has been pushed to mid-August. Executives at Fanatics continue hiding behind customer service employees in Discord. If there’s a plan, we haven’t heard it. Embarrassing.
2. Panini finally released the long awaited new website and Panini Direct app update in April and… yeah. Looks like they spent a lot of money changing fonts and colors and not much in the way of functional changes. Burning and staking are being promised for September although details remain scant so I’m not expecting much here. No one has any idea what/when the next soccer drop will be. We’re staring down a lonnnnng list of broken promises around their soccer IP in general dating back to the original Ligue 1 Foot FR stickers drop and now it’s sounding like we should expect a 2022 Qatar WC sticker NFT drop some time in Q3 or Q4 of this year? Make it make sense. Finally, the road to self-custody of Panini NFT’s (are these even NFT’s?) has become even more murky since late 2022. That’s a big deal (not the good kind) for us blockchain nerds. The CFO of the company is apparently running the project now. No plan. Embarrassing.
3. Fifa+ Collect continues chugging along as Panini and Fanatics/Topps continue fumbling the bag on one of the largest business opportunities the collectibles industry has ever seen, (ever). It’s not a project I’ve mentioned on the blog before but it’s one I’ve been following since their Genesis drop and official launch in October of last year. As a joint venture between Algorand and FIFA (heard of them?), FIFA+ Collect is a platform for licensed video moment NFT’s from World Cup archives dating back as late as the 1970 FIFA World Cup in Mexico all the way up through this past year’s 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar drop (which was surprisingly small/rare). FIFA+, like most soccer NFT projects, completely overestimated demand on their initial Genesis drop and early big spenders have been torched. There’s been a lot of ongoing chatter in their discord around burning the Genesis collection to help bring supply more in line with current demand, but we continue to await details. Of note, Fifa+ did in fact just launch a burning feature for their latest drop, a city poster set for the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. I believe the plan will be to test the burning features/capability on this latest drop before rolling out details about a potential Genesis burn.
4. LaLiga Golazos is another soccer NFT project that I have yet to really discuss on the blog. As the project title indicates, this is a LaLiga licensed video moments project run by Dapper Labs (another familiar name…). I’ve steered clear of this since the initial drop (also last October) because I didn’t like mint counts (read over supply) and I’ve seen what that’s done to Dapper’s other licensed sports projects like NBA Top Shot. With potentially four (4) fully licensed, web3 soccer projects, pack drops are going to need to be scarce and rare in a bear market to find any semblance of near term value. This is clearly not Dapper’s business model as there have been seven(!!!) new drops since their initial release in late October. Granted, this is the only place to find licensed video moments from LaLiga, and there are a few I’d like to have just to say they’re in the collection, but for now I watch from afar.
5. Bitcoin is up to ~$31k from ~$17k, a roughly 82% gain. BlackRock and Fidelity filed spot Bitcoin ETF applications with the SEC. While the headline last week was the applications were denied for inadequacies and being incomplete, the actual takeaway here was the SEC providing guidance, something they hadn’t done previously. Six months ago I was blogging about PayPal, Shopify, and Amazon. Now BlackRock and Fidelity…

If you’d like to understand more about the intersection of blockchain, soccer collectibles, and NFT’s, come join us in the EPLToken Discord!

In the mean time, let’s see if any of these soccer NFT projects do something worth blogging about before the end of the year.

Until then… – EPL out