When he was young, Cyril collected Panini stickers, these images of football players exchanged on the playing fields. “I like to look at them, to touch them, to turn the pages of the albums where we put them”, remembers this 42-year-old lawyer, supporter of Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). Now, he contemplates, on his computer, some cards of which he is the happy owner, having failed to touch them. These digital versions of good old Panini stickers are NFTs, non-fungible tokens or “non-fungible tokens”, in other words unique digital objects, which cannot be copied or forged. In the world of football, these are, for example, numbers of champions, videos of memorable goals or copies of trophies and jerseys.
Cyril, not really a techno buff, discovered NFTs with Covid-19, when his amateur football team was deprived of confinement on the lawns. His colleagues offered him to play online in Sorare. “Then? » he asked them.
Sorare, a French startup born in 2018, is the embodiment of “Excitement around NFTs”according to economic daily The echoes. At the beginning of each season, it issues 1,111 cards in NFT form for each of the players of the partner clubs: 1,000 called “communities” and free 111 “limited”pay and count – ie one hundred “rare”TEN “super rare” and one published in one copy.
Cyril is very proud of his nugget, Evanilson de Lima, a Brazilian striker from FC Porto, where he got a unique card for 150 euros. “Six months ago, I was offered 900 euros”, he was still surprised. Of course, he was a little disappointed that this young player did not appear in the selection ranks of Auriverde in the World Cup in Qatar. But there is no question of selling it, because it is caught in the game. “I am very interested in his results and his lifestyle. » It’s like the stock market: the brighter the player, the higher his rating.
At the auction, some rare cards reached stratospheric prices: 600,000 euros for Norwegian Erling Haaland; 416,000 euros for PSG star Kylian Mbappé; 394,000 euros for the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo. Even the most coveted Panini stickers can’t compete: Ronaldo’s for the 2002-2003 season fetched 71,186 euros in February; a 1974 multi-match Michel Platini and the Brazilian Pelé cost 80,000 euros on the eBay auction site.
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