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 freeze, granted by Westminster magistrates’ court, is intended to let the NCA examine possible links between the funds and alleged third-party criminality, and is currently set to run through September 14.

The money trail behind the deal

The freeze itself is narrow but pointed. Britain’s National Crime Agency obtained the order from Westminster magistrates’ court under the Proceeds of Crime Act, targeting a Barclays account held in the name of 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.

There’s no suggestion the Premier League itself did anything wrong, and the league declined to comment on the report. What’s frozen is specifically the opening payment from Sorare’s four-year sponsorship deal, announced back in January 2023 and worth a reported $41 million a year, or roughly $163 million across its full term.

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 pushes back, line by line

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 and “was not terminated as a result of any investigation or regulatory proceedings.”

A separate, slower-moving fight

Sorare’s bigger legal exposure sits elsewhere, in a case that has nothing to do with the frozen funds. The UK Gambling Commission charged the company in September 2024 with operating without a licence under the Gambling Act 2005, following an investigation that began three years earlier.

It was the regulator’s first prosecution of a blockchain-based platform. Sorare entered three not-guilty pleas at Birmingham magistrates’ court that October, and the trial, originally set for June 2026, has since been pushed to June 2027. The company says it “firmly” rejects being classified as gambling under UK law and intends to keep defending that position in court.

Why regulators are circling football’s crypto sponsorship deals

The scrutiny extends beyond Sorare specifically. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority wrote to Premier League clubs in June, warning that sponsorship arrangements with unauthorized crypto firms could breach 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 last 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.