Multibillion-dollar fantasy soccer site Sorare.com has pleaded not guilty to three counts of offering unlicensed gambling in the UK.
The Paris-based platform, which allows users to trade soccer playing cards in the form of NFTs, formally entered its plea via its lawyers at Birmingham Magistrates Court last Friday.
The French company reasserted its position that it does not require a gambling license in the UK because it does not offer gambling as defined by British law.
Business ‘Misunderstood’
The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) announced charges against Sorare at the end of last month in an extremely rare instance of the regulator exercising its prosecutorial powers.
The agency has only used these powers once before in its near-20-year existence. That was in 2015 when it secured a conviction against a greyhound trainer for race fixing and drugging dogs.
The charges are the culmination of a three-year UKGC investigation into Sorare, which has a license with the English Premier League to sell digital sports cards of players from all 20 of the league’s teams, a deal rumored to be worth US$40 million a year.
Shortly after the charges were announced, Sorare said the UKGC had “misunderstood our business and wrongly determined that gambling laws apply.”
Sorare enables users to build fantasy soccer teams by trading NFT player cards whose values rise and fall based on real-world performances.
The highest-scoring teams can receive cash rewards and other prizes, such as tickets to games and signed jerseys.
NFT Craze
Sorare is one of the real success stories of the NFT craze, which largely proved to be a flash in the pan. NFTs are digital tokens that can represent ownership of a virtual item, such as collectible sports trading cards or a work of art.
In 2021, Sorare received a US$680 million cash injection led by SoftBank. Today, the company is valued at US$4.3 billion. It employs 160 people in New York and Paris and claims to have 3 million users in 180 markets.
Its ambassadors and investors have included soccer stars Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe, Rio Ferdinand, Antoine Griezmann, and Gerard Pique, tennis player Serena Williams, and many others. In addition to the EPL, it has partnerships with MLS, the Bundesliga, Serie A, and La Liga, as well as the NBA and MLB.
On Friday, District Judge David Murray set a June 16 trial date for the case with a pre-trial hearing to take place March 10.
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