After football, Sorare tries baseball. The French start-up, which combines fantasy football and blockchain, has just taken a new major step by signing a partnership with Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), which represent all professional players of the baseball championship organized in the United States and Canada.
NFT cards related to this new sport will be added to the platform this summer. As part of this launch, the $4.3 billion start-up should be able to count on the international popularity of iconic franchises such as the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.
Soon the NBA and the NFL?
With this prestige league soon to be offered to its users, Sorare is expanding its footprint in the North American market, where it has just opened an office in New York. Across the Atlantic, the French unicorn, which signed the biggest fundraiser of French Tech with a round of funding of 580 million euros last year, has also distinguished itself by securing the services of the tennis player Serena Williams, who now sits on the company’s board of directors.
After MLB, other American sports leagues, such as the NBA (basketball), the NFL (ice hockey) or the PGA (golf), seem to be Sorare’s next natural targets to affirm his ambition: to establish himself as a world leader in sports entertainment. To date, Sorare claims 1.7 million created accounts and 370,000 monthly active users. If the fantasy sports market, which today brings together more than 200 million players worldwide, is booming and should weigh 42 billion euros by 2027, the NFT market is going through a delicate period, with plummeting values in the wake of cryptocurrencies.