FIFA, Upland Let Fans to Collect NFTs of Legendary World Cup Moments

FIFA and Upland, a metaverse gaming platform, inked a multi-year partnership, which will officially start with the World Cup Qatar 2022 later this month.

The first-of-its-kind partnership will let football fans around the world collect, own, and trade NFTs of legendary video highlights from upcoming World Cup games, a deal that makes the fans grasp the functions of metaverse and Web 3.0.

Upland, through its partnership with FIFA, aims to encourage fans to participate and contribute to the virtual community through a variety of activities, which will be held during and between the matches, according to Metaverse Insider website.

Upland will work with FIFA on creating gamified experiences on the metaverse. Over 3 million registered accounts will have access to a fully-constructed virtual replica of Qatar’s Lusail Stadium as well as FIFA World Cup-branded villages, showrooms, and shops.

All 32 World Cup teams will have digital country crests, shirts, boots, posters, logos, and team mascots featured in Upland. Through Upland metaverse, fans can buy virtual buildings decorated with flags of their favorite teams.

In this regard, Upland Co-Founder and Co-CEO Dirk Lueth expressed his excitement for creating “a multi-touch web3 experience” that displays innovation, fun, and entrepreneurialism, which represents opportunities for the future of FIFA World Cup, where fans can collect, own, trade and share real moments in the history.

Lueth asserted: “No other world competition unites countries and people worldwide quite like the FIFA World Cup.”

Upland could be downloaded for free on iOS, Android, and the web and is playable from anywhere in the world.

Over the past period, FIFA announced multiple gaming partnerships related to World Cup Qatar 2022, after its split with Electronic Arts. It collaborated this month with AI State Machine to launch a metaverse-focused football gaming experience.

It also cooperated with Phygtl, a digital production company, to let users “augment a golden-globe-football” and “own a limited fragment of it to attach and eternalize their handpicked FIFA World Cup pictures and video moments.” FIFA described it as a digital representation of eternal fandom.

In partnership with Matchday, FIFA will launch the Matchday Challenge during the tournament, which is a social prediction game based on football cards.

In September, it launched a new NFT collecting platform, FIFA+ Collect, which aims to offer football fans the opportunity to own the best moments of the FIFA World Cup, including epic images and artworks as NFTs.

FIFA+ Collect is available on FIFA+, the football association’s digital entertainment platform that offers access to live soccer matches from around the world, news and championship information, and interactive games. It is available on all web and mobile devices in three languages; English, French, and Spanish.