Buzzy Ethereum Game Football.fun Has Soccer Fans Scoring Crypto Gains

The growing soccer talk among active crypto traders is not just due to the return of the English Premier League (EPL), but also thanks in large part to Football.fun—a growing on-chain ecosystem that has provided sizable returns to early participants and soccer fans alike. 

The newly established protocol built on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, Base, allows users to buy shares in their favorite soccer players like Lamine Yamal and Kylian Mbappe across the world’s top professional leagues—like the EPL, La Liga, and Bundesliga—and be rewarded based on their actual performance. 

The game blends the experience of opening trading cards with elements of fantasy sports and crypto trading, and has grown more than 10x in just a few weeks—with the total market cap of player shares jumping from $6 million to more than $65 million since August 12. 

We’ve seen soccer fandom come to crypto in other ways before, such as through NFT fantasy game Sorare and via official fan tokens for a variety of top teams. But Football.fun is the latest effort that’s making waves—here’s how it works.

How Football.fun works

On Football.fun, users can trade shares of professional soccer players from the world’s top leagues. 

These shares not only act as a representative for the player in fantasy contests that reflect their on-the-pitch performance, but they also operate like crypto tokens, allowing users to speculate on their future value by buying and selling them like other popular crypto assets or meme coins. 

That speculation has led to massive gains for early users as the platform saw an influx of new users and rush of deposits, now up to $17 million in total, and a peak daily trading volume of greater than $15 million on August 24 according to a Dune dashboard. 

Shares can be acquired in two different ways: from the open market, where a user can use Gold (GOLD), the Football.fun market currency that is backed 1:1 with stablecoin USDC; or via packs, which can be acquired with tournament points (TP), earned via play in the platform’s biweekly fantasy contests. 

Packs, which offer shares in four random soccer players, come in three different tiers and prices, with the lowest offering 8-14 shares of players and the highest offering 285-535 shares for 2,000 TP. 

Because shares are only distributed via packs or the open market, the price of each player is wholly determined by the market supply and demand. Leading players like Yamal and Mbappe are priced at 1.61 GOLD and 1.22 GOLD, respectively–or $1.61 and $1.22 per share. 

Shares in less established or less skilled players can be acquired for as little as $0.02 per share. 

Playing Football.fun

The utility of a player’s shares reaches beyond speculation, as Football.fun users can use them to create “squads” playable in biweekly tournaments on the site. 

These squads or lineups act like those in typical fantasy sports leagues, traversing up and down leaderboards based on the actual performance of the players on the pitch. In addition to getting points for scoring goals and saving shots, players also can have points subtracted for blunders like own goals or missed chances. 

For each tournament, the soccer players that perform inside the top five at their position (or top three for goalkeepers) are rewarded—ultimately rewarding the Football.fun user who has them on their squad with Tournament Points (TP) and Skill Points, which allow them to promote players to their active squad.

Because TP is needed to open packs, a flywheel is created in which players are incentivized to create a squad to earn TP, and then use the TP to earn shares, which they can use to play the game or sell on the open market. 

But there’s a twist to playing shares on Football.fun: You can’t just own all the top players and use them for every single tournament. 

Instead each share comes with four “contracts,” or uses within a tournament on the platform. In other words, one share of Yamine Lamal will allow the user to put him on a roster and accrue points for his performance only four times. After that, a user must pay to “renew” his contract or purchase more shares of the player to use them in tournaments. 

Though the platform is in its infancy, it has already amassed more than 12,000 unique depositors for its pro product, and more than 3 million GOLD sits in balances on the platform waiting to purchase shares of new players on the open market. In the future, it intends to add a scouting system to help widen the pool of available soccer players.