Football league ISL launches NFTs, to offer team posters and trading cards

The Hero Indian Super League (ISL), the country's top-tier football championship, on November 17 launched non-fungible tokens (NFT) in which it has partnered with Terra Virtua, a London-based social, digital collectibles platform.

NFTs are digital certificates of ownership that are permanent, secured and encrypted using blockchain technology. This allows buyers of such digital collectibles to permanently own such assets.

The series of digital collectibles from ISL include 27,500 team posters and 242,000 trading cards. The launch of ISL NFTs come ahead of the 2021-22 season, which is scheduled to begin from November 19.

The digital collectibles will include rare team posters from ISL’s 11 clubs; ATK Mohun Bagan, Bengaluru FC, Chennaiyin FC, FC Goa, Hyderabad FC, Jamshedpur FC, Kerala Blasters FC, Mumbai City FC, NorthEast United FC, Odisha FC and SC East Bengal.

The series will also include a Titans Collection of player trading cards of the biggest stars in Indian football.

As a special first-time offer, every fan will get a free digital collectible of the club they support while signing up on the Terra Virtua platform.

An ISL spokesperson said that the league become India's first sports league to have its digital collectibles go live.

While ISL may be the first as a sports league to launch digital collectibles, many sports-based NFTs have been launched in India.

Sports is carving out its space in India’s NFT market with NFT launch announcements coming from cricketers like Rishabh Pant, who will soon be offering digital collectibles on Rario, a cricket-based NFT platform.

Apart from Pant, the platform has got cricketers including Smriti Mandhana, Zaheer Khan, Shafali Verma, Shakib Al Hassan and Faf du Plessis on board.