With the World Cup fully underway now, FIFA has devised a new method of creating additional excitement for football fans around the world with their sponsorship of Matchday which is a new NFT collection on the Solana network and Magic Eden that revolves around the world of football and its global fanbase. 

Governing sports bodies such as FIFA, the NFL, and the NBA have all taken a keen interest in the blockchain and how it can create unique layers of engagement for fans and the team/players that they root for. 

The collection

The collection itself will consist of the largest number of FIFA players from around the world and are available to trade as collectible cards among the community meaning that fans will have a chance at owning variations of their favorite club and national team players. 

The collection is supported by its partnership with FIFPRO which is the player’s union for FIFA athletes and consists of over 65,000 individuals; and while some lesser players from the large 65,000 pool may not be featured in the collection it means that there will be a huge variety of athletes to choose from. The project will also feature players from their Women’s leagues to further bolster the community with additional players.

Matchday Mobile

As for utility, the collection is preparing for a unique GameFi application that allows holders to use their player tokens as characters in-game. While details on the game are sparse, there is mention of being able to play against friends online via consoles and phones which means the game could resemble simulation football similar to the ongoing FIFA video game series which is ending its partnership with EA games; leaving the door wide open for game development studios to create their own takes on football video games. 

It’s unclear whether these tokens will provide any sort of utility towards fantasy sports-style games which are starting to receive an uptick in activity among users using the Sorare platform to bring the blockchain to fantasy sports. 

The World Cup and FIFA

The announcement of Matchday comes during a fruitful time for football as the world cup has now gone underway and is carrying significant sponsorships from Algorand and Crypto.com despite the notorious collapse of FTX earlier in the month that threatened the stability of crypto investing worldwide. 

However, fan tokens provided by different clubs, national teams, and players are all rising in popularity as many memecoins have begun using terminology from the World Cup to market their coins. Although these coins have little to no association with FIFA, it still shows that a lot of traders around the world are using the World Cup as a bonding event to keep the web3 community intact following a rough year that has caused billions of dollars to disappear from fraud, collapse, and poor leadership. 

In the end, it’ll be interesting to see how memecoins named after successful teams and players perform following big games and the ultimate prize of a champion. While this activity is more common on the BNB network, Matchday is moving in a similar direction by starting their collection just in time for the World Cup when all eyes will be on football during the holidays.