Is the NFL Ready for NFTs?
NBA Top Shot has led the NFT boom and several top NFL stars have entered the fray on their own. Can the league itself be far behind?
In brief
The NBA is leading the way in the NFT market with Top Shot.
But while many individual NFL players have launched crypto collectibles, the NFL has yet to make its own big NFT play.
Players and analysts think it's only a matter of time.
Digital collectibles sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have exploded in value and demand so far in 2021, with more than $1.5 billion in transaction volume in the first quarter alone, according to the latest figures from DappRadar. While digital artists like Beeple may have provided some of the splashiest moments in the space so far, it’s the sports world that’s leading the way.
One project has led the surge in both dollar value and overall visibility: Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot, which lets fans collect and sell real NBA video highlights. The NFT space is flourishing and the NBA has been the first sports league to capitalize on that. But where is the NFL, the world’s most profitable sports league, with its enormous and rabid fanbase?
NBA Top Shot launched to the public in October 2020, but exploded after the turn of the year, recently marking more than $500 million in total trading volume to date and driving Dapper’s valuation up to $2.6 billion (with a rumored bump to $7.5 billion incoming).
Each Top Shot moment is tokenized on the Flow blockchain and assigned a rarity grade and edition number, certifying its scarcity and helping to fuel demand. While randomized NBA Top Shot digital packs sell for as low as $9 (and as high as $999), the individual moments within can be significantly more valuable: a single LeBron James dunk moment sold for $387,600 in mid-April, and a few others have likewise broken the six-figure mark.
Top Shot has also helped introduce NFTs to the mainstream, providing a new revenue stream for sports leagues, teams, and players amidst the pandemic. In March, Front Office Sports reported that “the NFL, NHL, and MLB have been in talks with Dapper Labs and others in the NFT space” to create their own collectibles platform. Dapper Labs’ Caty Tedman, Head of Marketing and Partnerships, confirmed to the publication that they have “talked to a lot of other major leagues.”
The WNBA will get in on the Top Shot action later this year, Dapper has confirmed, plus the firm has a deal with Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) from February 2020 that has yet to bear fruit. Major League Baseball arguably arrived too early to the NFT boom with the 2018 launch of MLB Crypto Baseball (later rebranded to MLB Champions), a blockchain-driven game with digital collectibles that didn’t catch on. That project was discontinued, although Topps just launched its first set of MLB cards on the WAX blockchain. Meanwhile, racing leagues like Formula 1 and MotoGP have their own collectibles-driven crypto games.
What about the NFL?
Where is the National Football League in all of this? The NFL is the highest-grossing sports league in the world, with an estimated $16 billion in pre-pandemic revenue in 2019 versus $8.76 billion for the NBA for the 2018-19 season.
Sports Business Journal reported in March that the NFL’s Chief Media & Business Officer, Brian Rolapp, sent a memo to teams explaining that the league was looking into blockchain technology—for both ticketing and collectibles. "We believe there is considerable opportunity in the space that can benefit all clubs through both direct and indirect economics by leveraging our platform at the national level,” Rolapp reportedly wrote about NFT collectibles. (Requests sent by Decrypt to the league for comment went unanswered.)
In a March panel discussion moderated by Decrypt, Tedman—who previously worked for the NFL and NHL—said that she believed the American football league could thrive with NFTs, even if it might not be one of the first to market in the space.