Lionel Messi invests in a Web3 soccer game startup

Matchday, a soccer-focused Web3 gaming startup, has announced raising $21 million in a seed funding round. The amount raised from this seed funding has gone towards developing multiple gaming projects. One of the investors in the funding round was soccer star Lionel Messi through his venture capital firm.

Lionel Messi expands his Web3 portfolio with new investment

Messi’s venture capital firm is among the investors that backed the startup in the recent funding round. The other investors include Capricorn Investment Group, Courtside Ventures, Greylock HackVC, and Horizon Ventures.

The venture capital firm owned by Messi is known as Play Time. Messi is a legendary name in soccer and currently plays for Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). He also led the Argentinian national team to win the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

It is not the first time Messi is showing interest in the Web3 world, as he has already invested in several companies in the industry. He is the brand ambassador and an investor at the leading fantasy sports platform Sorare. He is also the ambassador of Socios, a fan token platform where he signed a $20 million endorsement deal.

Besides investing in these companies, Messi has also released his non-fungible token (NFT) collection. The digital collectibles were released through the Ethernity Chain platform.

Matchday targets the digital-savvy soccer community

The web3 game that Messi’s venture capital firm has invested in is known as Matchday. This platform has an official license from the FIFA football organization and the FIFPRO players association.

The CEO and co-founder of Matchday, Derrick Ko, commented on the development saying that this game would be optimized to attract casual users. He added that the company was creating a platform to target “an untapped audience in the football community.

The Chief Gaming Officer at Matchday, Sebastien de Halleux, noted that the games released by the platform would be accessible to all players. Additionally, these games would represent the true ownership of digital assets, which will be a source of pride to all the players.

Halleux has extensive experience in the gaming sector. he has worked as an executive at Electronic Arts (EA), one of the largest video game publishers. Halleux developed the FIFA game series and the Madden NFT platform at EA.

Web3 games allow users to own the game through NFTs that signify ownership over certain elements in the game, such as skins, items, and in-game characters. During the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Matchday published a limited-time mini-game and issued 2 million player cards to around 600,000 users.

Soccer and Web3 gaming have become more interconnected. In 2021, Sorare raised $680 million, attracting hundreds of teams and leagues. In the fall of 2022, FIFA announced an NFT platform on Algorand. Several soccer teams have also released fan tokens through Socios. The performance of a team usually determines the performance of fan tokens.