Sorare, the blockchain-based fantasy platform that last year secured a major partnership with English soccer’s Premier League, has been charged by the UK Gambling Commission for providing unlicensed gambling.
The company, which specialises in crypto-based digital collectibles, has denied the charge, and will appear in court on October 4.
The commission opened an investigation into Sorare in October 2021 over whether the products provided by the Paris-based firm were online gambling and required a licence.
Almost three years later, the regulator has now charged the company with “providing unlicensed gambling facilities to consumers in Britain”, with the company due to appear in Birmingham magistrates court.
Sorare, meanwhile, has said: “We are aware of the claims made by the Gambling Commission and have instructed our UK counsel to challenge them. We firmly deny any claims that Sorare is a gambling product under UK laws.
“The commission has misunderstood our business and wrongly determined that gambling laws apply to Sorare. We cannot comment further whilst legal proceedings are under way.”
Launched in 2018, Sorare has partnerships with over 300 soccer teams around the world and a host of the biggest leagues, including the Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy's Serie A, and the Dutch Eredivisie.
Club partners include European giants such as Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
The Premier League launched on the Sorare platform in 2023 under an initial four-year partnership that granted the firm a license to sell digital sports cards of players from all 20 of its clubs. The agreement is believed to be worth £30 million ($40.2 million) a year.
In the face of a troubling time for the whole cryptocurrency industry last year, the deal represented arguably Sorare’s biggest tie-up and a statement of intent, with the Premier League being the most valuable and most-watched soccer competition in the world.
The platform, co-founded by Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort, also has partnerships with North America’s MLB (baseball) and NBA (basketball) and claims to have over three million users worldwide.
In 2021, it raised $680 million in a Series B funding round that valued it at $4.3 billion.
Sorare, which has offices in Paris and New York, counts major international investment firms such as SoftBank, Accel and Benchmark among its backers, while global soccer stars Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe and tennis icon Serena Williams are investors in the firm.
