Two weeks before the 2026 World Cup kicks off, the two main players in the crypto-and-football collectibles category are both running World Cup marketing. Sorare, founded in Paris in 2018, runs an NFT-based fantasy football game, has raised about $769 million to date and was valued at $4.3 billion in its last round [1][2]. FIFA Collect is FIFA's own digital-collectibles platform, launched in 2022 and re-platformed to a dedicated Avalanche subnet in 2025 [3].

Both products call themselves "digital collectibles." Five years in, they have taken very different paths — different commercial scale, different disclosure, different kinds of regulatory challenges from different jurisdictions. This piece walks through them across four blocks: business, mechanism, market data, and legal status. All figures are current as of May 30, 2026.

Sorare was founded in 2018 in Paris by Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort. The product originally ran on Ethereum L1 and migrated to StarkNet, a Layer-2 network, in October 2021 to address gas costs [1]. Funding has been dense: a $680 million Series B in September 2021, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a $4.3 billion valuation — one of the largest European venture rounds of that year [2]. On the licensing side, Sorare works through FIFPRO, the global players' union, for player name-and-likeness rights, and has signed individual league deals with the Premier League (January 2023, reportedly £120 million over four years), Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, MLB (2022), the NBA (2023) and the UFC [4][5]. It does not hold full club shirt licensing; the model is "player likeness via the players' union."

FIFA Collect has taken the opposite route. In May 2022, FIFA announced a partnership with the Algorand blockchain, launching its first generation of digital collectibles around the Qatar World Cup [6]. On May 22, 2025, FIFA announced a migration to a dedicated Avalanche subnet — the FIFA Blockchain, built with technology partner Modex, designed to carry the 2026 World Cup collectibles program [3]. Unlike Sorare, FIFA Collect is not a venture-backed startup. It does not need to publish funding rounds or user numbers. It is an internal FIFA project, attached to FIFA's own IP and event calendar.

One side is a startup that runs on funding and growth metrics. The other is a sports governing body that runs on IP and tournament cycles. That structural difference shapes everything that follows.

Both issue NFTs, but the products themselves are quite different.

Sorare is a player-driven fantasy game. The core loop: assemble a lineup of five player cards each game week; scoring is based on those players' real-world performance (goals, assists, pass completion, defensive actions); seasonal rankings yield rewards in ETH and scarce cards [7]. Cards come in five rarity tiers — Common (free), Limited, Rare, Super Rare, and Unique — with only one Unique card per player per season. Unique cards are the scarcest assets in Sorare's secondary market. Players have to "play": picking the right athletes, tracking form, reading the fixture list. Returns depend on the quality of those decisions.

FIFA Collect is an IP-driven official collectibles product. The shape: card packs (some with randomized rarity) and "Historic Moment" NFTs, sold by FIFA, with fans collecting sets or trading individual items on the secondary market [8]. There is no fantasy game, no lineup, no scoring tied to live match performance. The user has to "collect": pick the player or the moment, judge scarcity and condition.

One short way to put it: Sorare asks the user to play; FIFA Collect asks the user to collect.

A note up front: the data each platform makes available is sharply uneven, and that asymmetry itself reflects the two business models.

Sorare (data-rich). Sorare CEO Nicolas Julia publicly disclosed in January 2023 that secondary-market card trading reached about $270 million in 2021 and roughly $500 million in 2022 [4]. On users: as of October 2024, the company has publicly cited more than 3 million registered users across 180 countries [9]. The highest verified single-card sale is a Cristiano Ronaldo Unique card auctioned at Bonhams on November 11, 2021, sold for $400,312 — a world record for a digital football trading card [10]. Worth noting: in November 2025, Sorare announced a 35% staff reduction, revenue fell from €59 million in 2023 to €43 million in 2024, and the company largely wound down its US operations — a significant adjustment after the peak growth years [15].

FIFA Collect (data-scarce). FIFA Collect does not publish user numbers, total secondary-market volume, or monthly actives. Market visibility relies on a single third-party tracker (Modex), with no aggregated public data [3]. What is publicly visible is mostly FIFA's drop calendar — when packs are released, when Historic Moments go live, when World Cup specials hit. Trading volumes, user base, repeat purchase rates — those remain a black box.

This is not a methodological problem; it is a business-model difference. Sorare is a startup that needs to raise money and acquire users, and disclosure is part of its narrative. FIFA Collect is an internal project of an established institution and has no equivalent reason to disclose. What readers can see, what they can verify, and what is missing — these distribute differently on the two sides.

This is the most consequential block of the comparison. Both platforms face regulatory challenges, but they come from different directions and turn on different mechanical features of the products.

Sorare — the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has opened a case examining whether Sorare's product constitutes gambling under UK law. On October 4, 2024, Sorare formally entered a not-guilty plea at Birmingham Magistrates' Court — the charge being "providing facilities for gambling without holding an operating licence," contrary to sections 33(1), (4) and 36(3), (3A) of the UK Gambling Act 2005. Trial is scheduled for June 15, 2026 [11]. The regulator's focus, on the public record, centers on several specific mechanical features: (a) players must purchase cards in order to participate; (b) rankings depend on real-world player performance, outside the user's control; (c) rewards include ETH and NFT cards with secondary-market value [11]. In France, the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) took a collaborative route rather than a punitive one: it worked with Sorare on a dedicated regulatory framework rather than classifying the platform as gambling. The result was JONUM (Jeux à Objets Numériques Monétisables, "games with monetizable digital objects") — a three-year experimental framework created by France's May 2024 SREN law, designed to cover Web3 fantasy platforms like Sorare, and formally operationalized by the ANJ in February 2026. As of March 2026, Sorare has not yet filed its JONUM declaration; the company says it is in "ongoing and constructive discussions" with the ANJ [12].

Sorare's own classification has consistently been "a skill-based fantasy football game." Its legal defense rests on the argument that outcomes depend on user judgment — picking players, reading form, managing a roster — which is skill, not chance. That debate over skill versus chance is what will be argued in court on June 15.

FIFA Collect — on October 17, 2025, Switzerland's gambling regulator, GESPA (Gambling Supervisory Authority), filed a criminal complaint with Swiss prosecutors alleging that FIFA Collect offers unlicensed gambling services in Switzerland. The complaint targets two specific product mechanics [13][14]:

GESPA stated publicly: "collect.fifa.com offers gambling services that are not licensed in Switzerland and are therefore illegal" [13]. GESPA director Manuel Richard noted that further details remain confidential as the case proceeds. FIFA, headquartered in Zurich, has had the complaint passed to Swiss prosecutors, and the case has not yet reached trial [14]. A clarification on status: a criminal complaint is a regulatory referral, not a court ruling — final liability and any penalties will be determined by the judicial process.

Two platforms, two product mechanics, two jurisdictions. But both are being examined along the same line: paid participation, an uncertain outcome, an asset whose value can be realized in secondary markets.

Sorare took the player-driven route: full global player-union licensing, deals with the top five European leagues, close to $800 million raised, secondary-market volume in the hundreds of millions of dollars at peak — and a core product mechanism scheduled for a UK court hearing on June 15, 2026 to determine whether it constitutes gambling.

FIFA Collect took the IP-driven route: attached to FIFA's own events and brand, minimal external disclosure, platform migrated from Algorand to Avalanche — and two product mechanics (NFT lottery-style drops, World Cup ticket priority tokens) under a Swiss criminal complaint filed in October 2025.

Two paths, two regulatory challenges, two parallel developments during the World Cup. What's visible in the products, what can be verified in the data, what isn't disclosed, what hasn't been ruled on — it's all in the public record.

[1] Sorare official website. https://sorare.com/

[2] Sorare, "Sorare raises $680M Series B to create the next sports entertainment giant leveraging NFTs" (PR Newswire press release), September 21, 2021. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sorare-raises-680m-series-b-to-create-the-next-sports-entertainment-giant-leveraging-nfts-301380764.html

[3] Avalanche, "FIFA Selects Avalanche to Power Its FIFA Blockchain for Football's Web3 Future", May 22, 2025. https://www.avax.network/about/blog/fifa-selects-avalanche-to-power-its-fifa-blockchain-for-footballs-web3

[4] CNBC, "Premier League signs deal with NFT-based fantasy soccer game Sorare", January 30, 2023 (includes CEO disclosure of 2021/2022 trading volumes). https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/30/premier-league-signs-deal-with-nft-based-fantasy-soccer-game-sorare.html

[5] Premier League, "Sorare partners with Premier League to launch digital player cards for fantasy football game", January 30, 2023. https://www.premierleague.com/en/news/3041553

[6] FIFA, "FIFA announces partnership with blockchain innovator Algorand", May 3, 2022. https://inside.fifa.com/organisation/president/media-releases/fifa-announces-partnership-with-blockchain-innovator-algorand

[7] Sorare Help Center. https://help.sorare.com/

[8] FIFA Collect official. https://collect.fifa.com/

[9] iGaming Business, "Sorare reports user and funding milestones", October 2024. https://igamingbusiness.com/

[10] Bonhams, "Back of the Net: Ronaldo Scores New World Record for Digital Football Trading Card at Bonhams", November 11, 2021. https://www.bonhams.com/press\_release/33216/

[11] UK Gambling Commission, "Consumer information notice: Sorare.com prosecution" (with June 15, 2026 trial date). https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news/article/consumer-information-notice-sorare-com-prosecution

[12] SBC News, "Sorare – nothing to declare?" (on France's ANJ JONUM framework and Sorare's declaration status), March 24, 2026. https://sbcnews.co.uk/sportsbook/2026/03/24/sorare-nothing-to-declare/

[13] Inside World Football, "Criminal complaint against FIFA filed over World Cup tokens" (with GESPA public statement), October 23, 2025. https://www.insideworldfootball.com/2025/10/23/criminal-complaint-fifa-filed-world-cup-tokens/

[14] SWI swissinfo.ch, "FIFA Faces Criminal Complaint Over World Cup Ticket Offer", October 17, 2025. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/fifa-faces-criminal-complaint-over-world-cup-ticket-offer/90183409

[15] CryptoTimes, "Sorare Lays Off 35% of Staff, CTO Steps Back as NFT Boom Fades", November 21, 2025. https://www.cryptotimes.io/2025/11/21/sorare-lays-off-35-of-staff-cto-steps-back-as-nft-boom-fades/