Today football news and video platform OneFootball announced it raised a $300 million Series D funding round led by blockchain investor Liberty City Ventures. Additionally, the company has created a web3 joint venture, One Football Labs, with blockchain games firm Animoca Brands and Dapper Labs known for its sports NFT deals with the NBA and NFL.
Other investors in the round include DAH, Quiet Capital, RIT Capital Partners, Senator Investment Group and Alsara Investment Group.
The German sports platform has 100 million active users and several leading soccer clubs are shareholders, including Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Olympique de Marseille. Most came on board when OneFootball acquired football streaming platform Dugout in December 2020.
Hence the goal of the Labs joint venture is to enable clubs, leagues, federations and players to create blockchain-based fan experiences.
“OneFootball will take tens of millions of football supporters from Web2 to Web3, while retaining the thing our platform was built on – a commitment to the real-world fan,” said Lucas von Cranach, founder and CEO, OneFootball.
“OneFootball and OneFootball Labs will transform the digital experiences for football fans, giving them more access, more ownership and bringing them even closer to the game we all love, in a way that’s never been done before.”
Meanwhile, Dapper Labs is a front runner in acquiring the NFT rights to video moments for Premier League football, although the deal is yet to be confirmed. Sales, including secondary sales, of Dapper’s NBA Top Shot video NFTs are just shy of $1 billion according to CryptoSlam and the market capitalization of the league’s moment NFTs is more than $580 million per MomentRanks.
In other soccer deals, Sorare landed Bundesliga NFT rights last year, including for video moments and owns NFT rights for fantasy football across a total of ten football leagues, including MLS and La Liga.
