NFTs in Sports: What Exactly Can Be Tokenized?

NFT sports are changing how fans connect with teams, athletes, and major moments. So what is NFT in sports? In simple terms, it is a blockchain verified digital asset that represents ownership of items such as digital sports cards, NFT packs, nft sports tickets, highlight clips, or nft sports trading cards.

The sports NFT market now includes nft sports collectibles, sports card NFT releases, sports trading cards NFT collections, and limited sport NFT drops tied to events. Platforms such as a sports NFT marketplace or sport NFT marketplace allow users to buy, sell, and trade these assets securely.

Understanding the NFT meaning in sports or NFT meaning sports cards helps explain why this space is growing. Beyond collectibles, there are nft sports games and interactive sporting NFT projects. With ongoing NFT sports marketplace development and rising interest in the best sports NFT marketplace options, the sport NFT market continues to expand for fans and investors alike.

What Is an NFT? Understanding the Digital Backbone of Sports Collectibles

If you’ve been hearing the buzz around NFT and sports but still feel a little lost, you’re not alone. Simply put, an NFT — or non-fungible token — is a unique digital proof of ownership that lives on a blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin, where one coin equals another, each NFT is completely unique, which makes it ideal for rare collectibles. So what does NFT mean in sports? Imagine owning a verified digital copy of a game-winning dunk or a one-of-a-kind virtual trading card — that’s the power of NFT crypto sports assets. Everything is recorded on a public ledger, so there’s no faking authenticity, which has long been a headache in the sports memorabilia NFT world. Whether we’re talking about NFT art sports creations or tokenized athlete highlights, blockchain keeps every item’s history locked in and transparent for good.

The Rapid Rise of NFTs in the Sports Industry

From a niche crypto topic NFT sports surprisingly fast moved to the center stage in professional leagues. Fans used to see NFTs as a strange internet trend. But after NBA Top Shot launched, the conversation changed. Now, people can not only watch highlight moments, but officially own them. Sales reached the hundreds of millions before many casual fans even understood what was happening.

Naturally, such success drew the attention of major leagues, well known athletes, and brands. They began releasing their own collections. Sport NFT drops from the NFL, UFC, and leading soccer clubs sold out in minutes, driven by hype and limited supply.

Another important factor influencing the rise of NFT was timing. During the pandemic, fans were home, spending more time online. Crypto markets were rising, and NFTs in Sport became new ways for people to feel connected to their teams. The rapid expansion of the sports NFT market made one thing clear: this was not a short term fad. It signaled a new approach to fan engagement and digital ownership.

Opportunities and New Revenue Streams for Clubs

Let’s be honest — most clubs are always looking for new ways to bring in money, and NFT sports has turned out to be a surprisingly practical option. Instead of relying solely on shirt sales and broadcast deals, teams can now drop digital sports cards NFT collections or exclusive sports nft drops and sell them straight to supporters without anyone else taking a slice.

What’s really caught people’s attention though is the resale angle. When a fan trades an NFT sports trading card or a piece of sports memorabilia NFT to someone else, the club still earns a percentage. That kind of ongoing return just wasn’t possible with physical merchandise sitting in someone’s drawer.

Some clubs have gone further. They started using NFT sports tickets as a way to reward loyal fans. People get extra bonuses like early access or meet-and-greets. Other companies are testing out sports NFT games where people build fantasy-style lineups using player tokens. Of course, failures happened. Plenty of experiments have flopped. But one thing is 100% clear – a well-run sport NFT marketplace can genuinely add to the bottom line while giving fans something they actually care about.

NFTs Metaverse AI: new opportunities ahead, after the recent NFTs breakdown

The NFT crash did hurt, nobody pretends it didn’t. Money was lost, projects disappeared, the reputation was damaged. Yes, it’s easy to just blame the technology but the thing is, the technology itself didn’t actually break. It’s still there.

Now that the initial frenzy has burned itself out, the conversation sounds completely different. Nobody serious is talking about flipping digital art for a quick payday anymore. The clubs and sports brands that didn’t run for the exit are taking their time, quietly figuring out how NFTs can work alongside the metaverse and AI in ways that actually mean something beyond a flashy announcement.

Here’s what that could look like in practice. A club uses AI to get a real sense of what individual fans care about — not just guessing, but actually understanding their preferences. Then based on that, it offers them personalized digital collectibles that open doors inside a virtual stadium or give them experiences that feel like they were designed with them in mind. That’s not a marketing gimmick. It’s using data and digital ownership and immersive spaces to make the connection between a club and its supporters feel more personal and more lasting.

The crash cleared the room of people who were only ever in it for the money, and honestly that needed to happen. What’s left now is space for the ones who want to build things fans will come back to because they genuinely enjoy them, not because they’re hoping the price goes up.

How Do Sports NFTs Work?

So a sports NFT is really just a digital item that sits on a blockchain. That blockchain proves it’s yours and nobody else’s. That’s pretty much it at the most basic level. But the thing that surprises most people is how many different forms they actually come in.

Memorabilia is the easy one to understand. Think signed shirts, match balls, that kind of stuff — except now they exist digitally and they’re verified so nobody can pass off a fake. Anyone who’s ever been burned buying a dodgy autograph online gets why that’s a big deal.

Trading cards are where most fans first dip their toes in. Same idea as swapping cards in the playground when you were a kid, just digital now. Everything sits in a wallet on your phone, and you can trade with someone halfway across the world without thinking twice. Some of the rare ones have gone for stupid money which tells you people aren’t messing around.

Clubs have started doing interesting things with kits too, turning match-worn shirts into verified digital collectibles. And those incredible goals and last-minute saves? They’re being packaged up as short clips that fans can actually own instead of just watching over and over on social media.

Ticketing is another one that makes a lot of practical sense. NFT tickets are really hard to fake and clubs can bake in perks like priority entry or exclusive content. Beats getting scammed by a tout outside the ground.

What’s really caught people’s attention though is the community side. Some clubs let NFT holders vote on small decisions like kit designs or which local charity to back. Others have set things up so part of every sale goes straight to a good cause without anyone having to think about it.

Nobody’s using all of these at once. Most clubs are still trying different things and seeing what sticks with their fans.

Case Study: NFTs Across the Sports World

The best way to understand how NFTs have actually landed in sports is to look at what’s already happened. Not the theory, not the projections — just the real examples. And there are a lot of them.

NBA Top Shot

Due to this, sports NFTs became known to most people. NBA Top Shot launched in 2020 after the NBA collaboration with Dapper Labs to sell officially licensed video highlights as digital collectibles called “Moments.” The setup felt instantly familiar — buy a pack, rip it open, see what you got. People couldn’t get enough. Over a million accounts signed up, the rarest clips started selling for crazy money, and a single LeBron James dunk went for around $230,000. That’s when everyone started paying attention.

NFL

The NFL saw what was happening and wanted in. By 2021 Dapper Labs had partnered with the league and the Players Association to launch NFL All Day — essentially the same playbook as Top Shot but built around American football highlights instead. If the formula worked for basketball fans, there was no reason it wouldn’t land with football fans too.

FIFA

This company took a slightly different approach. In late 2023, they launched FIFA+ Collect in partnership with tech firm Modex, offering fans the chance to collect and trade packs of digital football moments. Their first drop of 100 membership card NFTs sold for $999 each and came loaded with perks, including eligibility for tickets to the Club World Cup and World Cup finals. That’s not just a collectible sitting in a wallet — that’s a real-world experience attached to a digital purchase.

Paris Saint-Germain

It went further than most clubs. Starting in 2021, PSG released multiple NFT collections across different themes and partnerships. They worked with artist Ludo on their first Lucky Buddy figurines, auctioned a personalized video NFT celebrating Messi’s seventh Ballon d’Or, and collaborated with Taiwanese singer Jay Chou on a 10,000-piece Tiger Champs collection to mark their tenth league title. They even partnered with Clown Skateboards and fashion brand Blvck Paris, blurring the lines between sport, culture, and digital art. A lot of their drops directed proceeds toward the PSG Endowment Fund, which supports humanitarian and educational causes.

Sorare

It took the fantasy football model and gave it a blockchain backbone. Founded in Paris in 2018, the platform lets users buy, sell, and trade officially licensed digital player cards as NFTs on Ethereum. You build a five-a-side team, and your players earn points based on how they perform in real matches. It grew fast. By 2021, Sorare had raised $680 million in funding at a $4.3 billion valuation. It now covers football, basketball, and baseball, with partnerships spanning the Premier League, La Liga, the NBA, and MLB. Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé both came on as investors. What makes Sorare different from pure collecting platforms is that the cards aren’t just things you hold — they’re things you play with.

Team GB

They made history by becoming the first Olympic team to launch its own NFT collection. Ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Games, they partnered with NFT commerce provider Tokens to create a digital storefront. With no fans allowed in the stadiums due to the pandemic, it gave supporters a way to feel connected. Gymnast Max Whitlock kicked things off with an NFT celebrating his double gold in Rio. Each day of the Games, Team GB’s artist-in-residence Ben Mosley painted the most inspiring moments from the day before, and those paintings were minted and auctioned each evening. They later expanded the programme with the Gold Lion Club, offering fan tokens that unlocked signed merchandise, athlete meet-ups, and access to an eventual metaverse clubhouse.

FC Barcelona

The club entered the NFT world with its “Masterpiece” series. Their first drop was an audiovisual tribute to Johan Cruyff’s iconic 1973 flying goal. But it was their second collection in 2023 that really turned heads — a collaboration with World of Women honouring Alexia Putellas and her historic Champions League performance. That single NFT sold for over $300,000, and the buyer received a personal meeting with Putellas, a physical seat from Spotify Camp Nou, and a signed pair of her match-worn boots. Barça’s president Joan Laporta has been open about the club’s digital ambitions, positioning NFTs as part of a broader strategy alongside crypto and the metaverse.

Credit Suisse and the Swiss Football Association

An entirely different approach here. In 2023, they teamed up to create 756 NFTs featuring digital portraits of the Swiss Women’s National Team. All proceeds went directly to supporting women’s football. The NFTs were sold through Credit Suisse’s CSX digital banking app, with packages ranging from around $167 to $11,000. Holders received perks like physical artworks, player interactions, and signed jerseys. It wasn’t about speculation — it was about using the technology to fund something that genuinely needed the support.

Mastercard

During the 2023–2024 UEFA Champions League season, the company used NFTs in a more practical way. Instead of pushing sales, it launched an NFT powered trivia game built on Polygon in partnership with MoonPay. Fans could claim free branded NFT passes and test their knowledge of Champions League history. The rewards were real. Winners received match tickets, and the top player by the semi finals earned a trip to the final at Wembley. Rather than selling collectibles, the brand used NFTs as access tools to reward loyal supporters. It was a clear example of how blockchain can strengthen fan engagement instead of just driving hype.

Arsenal FC

They stepped into the space in 2023 with their “Arsenal Journey Pass” — 400 NFTs sold for $400 each in collaboration with travel company Staynex. These weren’t just digital tokens. The Gooner tier included match tickets and four-star hotel stays, while the Legendary tier offered box seats and five-star accommodations. It was a neat crossover between fandom and travel, and it showed how clubs can bundle real experiences with digital ownership.

Cristiano Ronaldo

Individual athletes have been just as active. Cristiano Ronaldo partnered with Binance for a multi-year NFT deal starting in late 2022. His first collection of over 8,600 NFTs sold out immediately, with the rarest pieces auctioning for tens of thousands of dollars. Holders got perks ranging from signed shirts to virtual meet-and-greets with Ronaldo himself. He went on to release four collections in total, even as legal challenges around Binance’s operations made headlines.

Statue of LeBron

Then there are the moments that became bigger than the technology itself. The Statue of LeBron — a full-resolution photograph of LeBron James — was listed at 10,000 ETH, worth over $32 million at the time.

Kobe Bryant’s Last Tweet

The night before he died, Kobe hopped on Twitter to shout out LeBron for passing him on the all-time scoring list. “Much respect my brother” — just a simple, classy message. Nobody knew those would be his last public words. When that tweet was turned into an NFT, it went for nearly $2 million, and honestly, it’s hard to think of a digital collectible that carries that kind of emotional weight.

The Golden State Warriors Championship Ring NFT

The Warriors decided to take one of their championship rings digitally and auction it off as an NFT on OpenSea. It pulled in $871,000, which is wild when you think about it — paying that much for something you can’t actually wear. But part of the money went to the Warriors Community Foundation supporting kids and education in the Bay Area, so it wasn’t just a cash grab.

Naomi Osaka NFT Sports Collection

Naomi Osaka brought her sister Mari into the mix to create a six-piece NFT collection that felt more like an art show than an athlete merch drop. The whole thing sold for nearly $600,000, with one piece alone going for over $200,000 — the biggest single NFT sale by any tennis player at that point. If you know anything about Naomi, it tracks perfectly. She’s never been just an athlete.

Erling Haaland NFT Sports Collection

Haaland’s NFT went for 265 ETH, which worked out to about $870,000. But the part that actually stood out was that some of the money went toward mental health support for athletes. In a space where a lot of drops feel like quick money grabs, it was nice to see someone use the moment to highlight something that actually matters.

Lineal by Tyson Fury

Tyson Fury being Tyson Fury, he didn’t just sell a digital file and call it a day. His “Lineal” NFT went for $987,000 and came with a real oil painting plus personal memorabilia from his career. The name’s a nod to his lineal heavyweight title, which he’ll tell you about whether you ask or not. The whole thing just felt very him — loud, genuine, and impossible to ignore.

Rob Gronkowski Championship Series NFTs

Gronk picked four of his biggest Super Bowl moments and turned them into NFTs. Altogether they brought in around 860 ETH — roughly $3 million. He was one of the first NFL guys to really go for it in the NFT world, and collectors clearly ate it up. It was the most Gronk thing ever: show up, have fun, and somehow walk away with a fortune.

Lionel Messi: “The Golden One”

Messi’s standout NFT was called “The Golden One” — an animation of him playing with a flaming golden ball, a pretty obvious nod to all those Ballon d’Or trophies. It sold for around 3,000 ETH on the Ethernity Chain, putting it up there with the most expensive athlete NFTs ever made. The wider “Messiverse” collection had more affordable pieces too, so everyday fans could get in on it without spending a fortune.

Oleksandra Oliynykova

And then there’s Oleksandra Oliynykova, the 20-year-old Croatian tennis player who did something nobody else had tried — she sold an NFT backed by the space on her right shoulder, giving the buyer the right to choose what graphic or tattoo would go there. It was auctioned on OpenSea for 3 ETH. Not the most expensive, but arguably the most creative.

What all of these examples share is that they weren’t just stunts. Whether it was a league building an entire platform, a club funding women’s football, or an athlete giving fans something personal to hold onto, the common thread is people trying to figure out how this technology can create a real connection — not just a transaction.

The Tricky Legal Qualification of NFTs

Here’s the problem nobody really solved before the money started flying around — what actually is an NFT in the eyes of the law? It sounds like a straightforward question but it really isn’t, and the answer changes depending on who you ask and where you happen to be standing.

Right now there’s no global consensus on how to classify these things. Some regulators lean toward treating them as commodities, which would bring them under trading and market manipulation rules. Others argue that certain NFTs could qualify as securities, especially if buyers are purchasing them with the expectation of making a profit from someone else’s efforts — that’s the so-called Howey Test in the United States. If an NFT fails that test, it falls outside securities law. If it passes, suddenly you’re looking at registration requirements, broker-dealer rules, and a whole stack of compliance obligations that most sports clubs and athletes never planned for.

When you throw intellectual property into the mix, sport makes the whole thing ten times harder to untangle. Nearly every sports NFT out there has an athlete’s face on it, their name attached to it, or their voice somewhere in it. And in a lot of cases nobody specifically sat down and said yes, you can turn my likeness into a digital asset and let strangers trade it back and forth indefinitely.

The other thing that catches people out is what you actually get when you buy one. Most people assume they own the image or the video clip. They don’t. They own the token — a line on a blockchain that says this particular thing belongs to them. Displaying it online is usually fine. But the moment someone tries to print it on merchandise or make copies to sell, they’re stepping into territory the purchase almost certainly doesn’t cover. And reading the smart contract beforehand wouldn’t necessarily help either, because the wording in those things is rarely what you’d call straightforward.

Juventus was one of the first clubs to find out what happens when this goes wrong. A company called Blockeras started creating and selling digital trading cards with the club’s name, badge, and player images plastered all over them. They never asked for permission. Not from the club, not from anyone. Juventus took them to court in Rome and the judge came down hard, shutting the entire operation down and banning them from producing or marketing any more of the cards. It became one of the earliest proper legal precedents for football NFTs in Europe and made it pretty clear that using someone else’s brand without consent has consequences, digital or not.

Image rights just make everything thornier. Swiss law protects things like your name and face under the Civil Code. Italian law won’t let anyone use your portrait commercially without your say-so. Players do sign agreements with their clubs and sponsors that deal with some of this, but here’s the catch — most of those contracts were written well before NFTs existed. Whether the fine print stretches far enough to cover a digital token living on a blockchain is a question nobody has fully answered yet. And that kind of ambiguity is fertile ground for expensive legal disputes.

Then there are taxes, which are frankly all over the place. Switzerland made an effort in 2021 to lay out how crypto income and token offerings should be handled, but beyond that it’s a patchwork at best. What’s considered taxable in one country might not even register in the next one. The rules keep shifting and there’s no real consistency between jurisdictions.

The plain truth is that the legal system hasn’t kept up. In some countries the rules around sports NFTs are vague. In others they’re contradictory. And in plenty of places they simply don’t exist yet. None of that means people should avoid the space entirely — but walking in without proper legal advice right now is the kind of shortcut that tends to cost a lot more than it saves.

The Tax-Legal Considerations

If figuring out what an NFT legally is gives you a headache, trying to work out how it’s taxed will make it worse. Because nobody’s really cracked that one either.

Over in the US the IRS looked at NFTs and decided they’re property. Simple enough on the surface, but what it means in practice is that every time you sell one or swap it for something else, you might owe capital gains tax. Sell it within a year and you could be paying rates as high as 37 percent. Wait a bit longer and the long-term rate kicks in, which is easier to stomach. But then the IRS went and muddied things further by suggesting some NFTs might actually count as collectibles — and collectibles get taxed at up to 28 percent. So is your digital basketball highlight a collectible or just regular property? Right now that depends on who you ask.

Things look different for the people on the other side of the sale. Athletes and clubs minting and selling their own NFTs generally can’t treat that money as capital gains. It’s ordinary income, taxed the same way as a salary or business earnings. If it’s a proper commercial operation there’s self-employment tax stacked on top of that. And those royalty payments that everyone loves talking about — the ones that land in your wallet each time your NFT changes hands — the tax office wants a piece of those too. Every time. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Premier League club or a retired tennis player running a one-off collection.

Now throw crypto into the mix and things really start to tangle. Spend Ethereum to buy an NFT and the IRS doesn’t just see someone buying a digital collectible. It sees you selling your crypto first — which might trigger its own separate gain or loss — and then purchasing a completely new asset with the proceeds. Nobody sitting up at two in the morning bidding on a rare player card is thinking about double tax events, but that’s the reality.

Go outside the US and it’s a different story again. Switzerland had a go at setting out some rules in 2021 for how crypto and token income should be treated, but they’re still fine-tuning it. The EU has been working on MiCA regulations, though how those land on any particular NFT depends on what the token actually does. Some countries say it’s income. Others call it capital gains. And a handful just haven’t said anything useful yet, which leaves everyone guessing.

The one thing that pretty much everyone agrees on is that you need to write everything down. Every purchase, every sale, every royalty that hits your wallet, every gas fee you paid along the way. The rules might be fuzzy but that doesn’t give anyone a free pass on reporting. Tax authorities have been paying a lot more attention to what’s happening in the crypto and NFT space than most people realise, and finding out the hard way can mean fines and legal problems that end up costing far more than whatever the token sold for in the first place.

Risks: Speculation and Security

For all the excitement around sports NFTs, there’s a side to this that doesn’t get talked about enough — and it costs a lot of people real money.

Speculation was baked in from the start. When prices were climbing and everyone was buying, it was easy to forget that most NFTs don’t hold their value. People were paying thousands for digital highlights and player cards expecting the price to keep going up, and when the hype cooled off plenty of them were left holding tokens worth a fraction of what they paid. The market rewarded the early sellers and punished the people who held on too long, which is pretty much how speculative bubbles always play out.

But speculation is only part of the problem. The fraud side of things has been genuinely ugly. Rug pulls — where someone hypes up a project, gets people to invest, then disappears with the money — have become disturbingly common. The Eternal Beings collection was a high-profile example. Rapper Lil Uzi Vert promoted it to millions of followers, and shortly after they bought in he deleted his posts and the value collapsed. That kind of thing doesn’t just burn the people involved. It damages trust in the entire space.

Then there’s wash trading, which is when someone buys and sells their own NFTs to make it look like there’s real demand and push the price up. A Chainalysis report from 2021 found that just 110 wash traders made nearly $8.9 million doing exactly that. It’s technically market manipulation, but because regulation hasn’t caught up, most of it goes unpunished.

Counterfeiting is another constant worry. Criminals copy artwork or player imagery, mint fake NFTs, and sell them on platforms that don’t always check what’s being listed. By the time a buyer realises they’ve purchased a counterfeit, the seller has vanished behind an anonymous wallet and there’s almost no way to get the money back.

Phishing scams round out the picture. Fake websites that look identical to legitimate marketplaces trick people into entering their wallet details, and once that information is handed over the contents of the wallet are gone. The US Treasury’s 2024 risk assessment found that between July 2021 and July 2022 alone, scams resulted in roughly $100 million worth of NFTs being stolen.

None of this means sports NFTs are inherently bad or that every project is a scam. But anyone getting involved — whether they’re a fan spending fifty quid on a digital trading card or a club launching a full collection — needs to go in with their eyes open. The technology might be secure, but the ecosystem around it still has some serious holes that bad actors are more than happy to exploit.

The Future

If you are waiting for a clear roadmap that shows exactly where sports NFTs are going, that roadmap does not exist. Space is still evolving. What we do know comes from watching what survived after the hype faded.

The projects that are still active have something in common. They gave fans a reason to care that had nothing to do with resale value. They offered access, recognition, and a stronger sense of belonging. Supporters felt closer to their teams, not just like traders watching price charts. The projects built purely around flipping for profit disappeared, and few people seem to miss them.

The next stage will likely be quieter. Instead of attention grabbing million dollar drops, NFTs may operate behind the scenes. Game tickets are stored on a blockchain. Membership passes that unlock loyalty-based benefits. Reward systems that actually remember who you are. As AI and immersive digital spaces develop, these tools could make fan experiences more personal without requiring fans to understand the technology.

Trust is the key factor. After scams and sudden shutdowns, confidence needs to be rebuilt carefully. The technology works. What matters now is whether clubs and companies use it with long-term commitment and respect for their supporters.

Conclusion

Sports NFTs is still alive and actively developing. The hype is gone but the tech experts stayed. They stopped worrying about prices and started thinking about what fans actually want. And a lot of interesting stuff is done now.

However, it’s a rough task to figure everything out by yourself. Legal stuff. Tax rules. Scams and ghost projects. You don’t get their trust back by just showing up with a nice website.We’ve been deep in all of this for a while. So if you’re a club that can’t tell what’s worth doing and what’s a waste of money, or a player who doesn’t fancy becoming a cautionary tale, or a brand that’s just tired of people talking in circles — ring us. No deck, no jargon. Just a proper chat about whether any of this makes sense for what you’re trying to do.