Spain's La Liga soccer league partners with French platform Sorare to offer NFTs of all its players, the first major European soccer league to do so
Spain's La Liga has become the first of Europe's top soccer leagues to offer non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for all its players.
Context & Ripple Effects
Sorare spent early 2021 building credibility before landing this deal: its ethereum-based soccer card marketplace raised a $50M Series A led by Benchmark in February, and the La Liga partnership announced in September made it the first platform to put every player from a major European league onchain. The move also positioned Sorare against Dapper Labs, whose NBA Top Shot dominated US sports NFTs and which had itself just partnered with LaLiga after raising $250M.
The regulatory backdrop matters as much as the deal: within a month, the UK Gambling Commission opened an inquiry into whether Sorare needed gambling licenses, a question that shadows every league signing with the platform. La Liga's earlier reputation for aggressive fan monetization — including an app that spied on fans to catch pirated streams — frames this as another front in the league's push to extract value directly from supporters.
First-order effects
- Every La Liga player becomes a tradable digital asset overnight, giving the league a new licensing revenue stream and giving Sorare exclusive inventory no rival marketplace can match.
- Dapper Labs' NBA Top Shot now competes head-to-head with Sorare in soccer, after both platforms had claimed partnerships with the same league within two weeks of each other.
Second-order effects
- Other top European leagues face pressure to sign their own NFT deals rather than cede player-IP territory — a dynamic that materialized when the Premier League later struck a four-year Sorare contract reportedly worth tens of millions per year.
- Gambling regulators become the gating factor for the whole category: if the UK inquiry or Spain's own licensing stance classifies NFT fantasy games as betting, leagues' partner choices carry compliance risk, not just commercial upside.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, league media strategies bifurcate: broadcast and streaming rights stay with traditional buyers while player-level digital IP is licensed to blockchain platforms, making collectibles games a third major rights category alongside TV and sponsorship.
- The unresolved gambling-classification question could force a structural split between pure collectible platforms and betting-regulated ones, shaping which startups leagues can legally partner with across jurisdictions.
The trend: European soccer leagues are converting player IP into blockchain-based digital assets through specialist platforms like Sorare, with gambling regulators increasingly determining how far the category can expand.