Leading athlete commercial rights representation firm, Polaris Sports announced that it has partnered with Zilliqa, the high-performance blockchain platform, to create and release exclusive non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for 10 global football champions. These NFTs feature the likes of world-renowned striker Diego Costa and South American superstar James Rodríguez who has played for Real Madrid CF, Everton FC, and Colombia’s national football team. The collection will be dropping on June 6, 2021.
James Rodríguez said: “Throughout the past few months, NFTs have proven themselves as a powerful new medium to engage with fans across the globe. Bridging the gap between traditional sports memorabilia and digital collectibles, I’m excited to see what this new medium has to offer through this collaboration with Zilliqa and Polaris.”
Through this partnership between Zilliqa and Polaris, this co-created NFT collection will bring some of football’s leading talents greater autonomy and monetisation opportunities for their own personal brands. The NFT drop includes:
– Former Chelsea and Atlético Madrid striker Diego Costa;
– Everton F.C and Colombia national team midfielder James Rodríguez;
– Porto team captain and Portugal national team centre-back Pepe;
– Ligue 1 club Paris Saint-Germain goalkeeper Keylor Navas;
– Galatasaray forward and Colombia national team captain Radamel “El Tigre” Falcao;
– Liverpool F.C. and Portugal national team forward Diogo Jota;
– Atlético Madrid and Portugal national team forward João Félix;
– Wolverhampton Wanderers and Mexico national team forward Raúl Jiménez;
– Lille and Portugal national team midfielder Renato Sanches; and
– Manchester City F.C. and Portugal national team centre-back Rúben Dias.
SUPERPACK, a single collectible featuring all 10 players with additional never-before-seen footage.
Each player’s NFT will be sold as an Individual Player Pack and will be available in three thematic colour variations — gold, copper, and steel— with 111 packs per colour, amounting to a total of 333 packs per player. Out of the 333 NFTs sold for each individual player, five buyers have the opportunity to potentially receive a signed jersey from the respective players. In addition, one fan will also have the chance to win the autographed boots or gloves belonging to the corresponding player of the pack they purchased. These autographed items were signed by the players themselves on-set during the shooting of the content for their NFTs. Each Individual Player Pack will be sold for US$3,500 per unit.
The 11th NFT product, dubbed the “SUPERPACK” consists of the NFTs of all 10 partner players, along with a specially autographed digital card NFTs available only in this particular pack. Limited to 999 copies, it will also come in the three aforementioned colour variations of gold, copper, and steel with 333 pieces per colour. SUPERPACK will be sold for US$20,000 per unit. Additionally, 3 purchasers of the SUPERPACK will get the chance to virtually meet three players and five of the 999 buyers will receive autographed jerseys from all 10 of the players in the NFT collection.
Diego Costa said: “During a period of time where we’ve been unable to engage with our fans and give them that full, stadium experience, NFTs have become a creative new way to keep that fan experience alive. As a tradable collectible, we hope that football fans enjoy the value that they can reap from the collection.”
The specially produced NFT collection is inspired by traditional baseball cards as a digital, animated collectible that highlights notable player stats accompanied with unique graphics, player footage, and a personal video interview. As a collaborative undertaking, productions took place across Italy, Portugal and Singapore with on-location footage shot with the 10 football athletes across the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Portugal, and Turkey.
Amrit Kumar, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Zilliqa, said: “This joint endeavour with Polaris is a critical milestone for Zilliqa as we cement our position in the NFT space. Despite the challenges of collaborating from afar, we’re so thrilled to be bringing NFTs to ‘the beautiful game’. Enabled not only by their passion for football, we also want to recognise the players’ commitment to their fans that made it possible to reinvigorate the fan experience with these special collectibles.”
The collection is the first to be created via Zilliqa’s brand-new whitelabel NFT solution. Powered and secured by Zilliqa’s high-performance, high-security blockchain platform, the NFTs will be available for purchase on Zilliqa’s marketplace starting June 6, 2021
About Polaris
Polaris Sports is one of the worlds’ leading commercial agencies, representing some of the greatest stars in sports. Other than the 10 players present in this collection, it also represents other outstanding sports personalities such as Cristiano Ronaldo, José Mourinho, Gonçalo Guedes and André Silva.
The company, which works with all the main global brands in different marketing tools, such as endorsements, personal branding, new media, licensing and sales, began operations in 2005 and has since positioned itself as one of the world’s best sponsoring sports agencies. By focusing efforts on promoting its athletes and managing their commercial rights, it has strengthened its leading position in the market.
Polaris maintains its philosophy of associating with the greatest young talents in sports, nationally and internationally, to ensure, increase and underpin their commercial status on a global scale.
About Zilliqa
Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform built for business, catalysing open commerce with its secure-by-design smart contracts, and low-cost transactions for digital assets.
Developed through academic research, Zilliqa is helmed by a team of experienced scientists, leading engineers, financial services specialists, and venture creators. Driven by the mission to commercialise blockchain-based application, Zilliqa focuses on use cases across asset securitisation, decentralised and open finance, incentivised marketing, and secure tokenisation — the conversion and representation of assets as digital, blockchain-based tokens.
In 2019, Zilliqa became the first public blockchain platform to be built on sharded architecture, with smart contracts written in the platform’s secure-by-design programming language, Scilla.
For more information, visit: zilliqa.com