The first league to say yes was Belgium's. In 2018, two engineers with an unfinished card game for football fans got a licensing deal with the Jupiler Pro League. It was not Real Madrid. It was not even the French Ligue 1. But it was proof that a league would put its players' names on something built on a blockchain.
Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort had met at Stratumn, a Paris blockchain company where Julia ran operations and Montfort led engineering, according to profile sites. They had spent years selling a technology that most clients did not understand. Julia has described getting into crypto companies from about 2015, and he was drawn to NFTs in 2018, long before the world had heard the word.
In February, Antoine Griezmann and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian joined a €40 million round.
They left Stratumn and started Sorare in December 2018. Julia, a graduate of the emlyon business school, handled the business. Montfort, with degrees in telecom engineering and data engineering, built the game. The idea was fantasy football where the cards are scarce, owned by the player, and can be sold.
Money arrived in small amounts. About €550,000 of pre-seed came in May 2019 from investors including Xavier Niel's Kima Ventures. A $4 million seed followed in July 2020 with Partech and E.ventures, along with the former Germany international André Schürrle. Then Juventus signed in 2020, and with the club came Cristiano Ronaldo's card.
The turn came in 2021, when NFTs became a global story. In February, Antoine Griezmann and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian joined a €40 million round. In September, Sorare raised €680 million at about $4.3 billion, a European record. Revenue that year was about €325 million, according to Les Échos. Mbappé, Zidane and, in November 2022, Messi became ambassadors.
The fall-out was regulatory and financial. In July 2022 France's gambling regulator warned the company about its rules. In September 2024 the UK Gambling Commission prosecuted it, reportedly the first such case against a major Web3 platform. Sorare responded with stricter identity checks and self-exclusion tools, and in 2025 moved from Ethereum to Solana. A report in November 2025 said it might cut 35% of its staff to turn a profit in 2026.
Nobody can say yet how it ends. What the early years do show is a pattern first-time founders can use. Julia and Montfort did not wait for a famous club. They took the small league that would sign, used it to approach bigger ones, and built each deal on the last one.