Premier League goes to court to unfreeze $13.6M tied to its Sorare sponsorship deal

The Premier League is in court this week seeking to unfreeze $13.6 million of its own funds, held in a Barclays account and frozen by Britain’s National Crime Agency since January 2025 under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

The money is the opening payment from the league’s four-year, $163 million sponsorship deal with Sorare, the blockchain-based fantasy football game backed by Lionel Messi, though Sorare says the account “does not belong” to it and that the company itself is not under NCA investigation.

The order gives investigators room to check whether the funds are connected to wrongdoing involving other parties, and it’s currently due to lapse on September 14.

The money trail behind the deal

Westminster magistrates’ court granted the National Crime Agency’s request for the freeze in January 2025, giving it power under the Proceeds of Crime Act to lock funds that Barclays holds for The Football Association Premier League Limited.

An NCA spokesperson said the goal is “to prevent dissipation of the funds while the NCA investigates any potential links between those funds and alleged third-party criminality,” according to The Sun, which first reported the freeze.

The Premier League hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing here and hasn’t commented publicly. Sorare’s sponsorship arrangement dated to January 2023, ran four years, and carried an estimated price tag near $163 million total (which is around $41 million annually), with the frozen sum representing just that opening year’s installment.

The league’s own finances dwarf that figure: its most recent accounts, filed to July 2025, show reserves above $2 billion, and it’s now seeking to have the order varied, with the current freeze set to run through September 14.

Sorare’s rebuttal

Sorare disputes the framing of the story more than the underlying facts. In a statement to Decrypt, a company spokesperson said the Sun’s reporting contained “factual inaccuracies,” stressing that Sorare itself is “not under investigation by the UK National Crime Agency” and that the frozen account “does not belong to Sorare.”

The company also pushed back on any link between the freeze and its expired Premier League contract, saying the sponsorship deal ended naturally at the close of its term rather than being cut short by any investigation or regulatory action.

A separate, slower-moving fight

A separate, unrelated legal fight has been grinding through the UK courts since well before the NCA freeze existed. The Gambling Commission opened its investigation into Sorare’s card-trading model back in 2021, eventually filing charges in September 2024, the regulator’s first case against a blockchain platform, for running gambling facilities without a licence under the Gambling Act 2005.

Birmingham magistrates recorded three not-guilty pleas from Sorare that October. What was meant to reach trial by June 2026 has since slipped a full year, to June 2027. Sorare maintains, in its own words, that it “firmly” rejects the gambling label and plans to fight the charge in court.

Why regulators are circling football’s crypto sponsorship deals

Back in June, the Financial Conduct Authority sent Premier League clubs a formal warning: partnering with crypto firms lacking proper authorization risks running afoul of financial services law.

“Millions of football fans trust their club’s badge,” said Lucy Castledine, the FCA’s director of consumer investments, adding that clubs “should not let unauthorised financial firms exploit that loyalty by putting potentially dodgy products in front of millions of fans.”

Coming just months before the NCA freeze became public, the warning reads less like a one-off caution and more like regulators positioning themselves ahead of a wider reckoning with crypto’s growing footprint in sports sponsorship.

That footprint has been sizeable for Sorare. Founded in 2018 as a crypto-only card marketplace running on Ethereum, the company added cash payment options in 2023 and has counted Messi, Zinedine Zidane, Kylian Mbappé and Serena Williams among its investors and ambassadors.

Its most recent disclosed valuation, tied to a SoftBank-led funding round, put the company at $4.3 billion. Whether Sorare’s flagship product still fits that profile once the gambling case is decided is, for now, a question only a UK court will answer.