Play-to-Earn on Nifty Football — How to
Nifty Football is set to be the world’s first Play-to-Earn football management game, heralding a new era in which fans of classics like Football Manager can now trade players with real-world value and compete on an international stage.
Football Manager and its predecessor Championship Manager have dominated the football management game market for thirty years thanks to their unrivalled gameplay and the desire of millions of fans to show the real managers of the world how they’ve got it all wrong.
There’s only ever been one thing missing: real money.
Nifty Football drags the concept of a football management simulator into the exciting and decentralised world of Web 3.0; where players, coaches, scouts, stadiums and even the managers are NFTs.
For the un-initiated, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are unique digital assets with real world value. That means you can buy and sell legal ownership of them (and all associated IP rights) on the open market with real currency such as Bitcoin, Ether or the soon-to-be-generated $NFTF Nifty token.
For disciples of the classic games who were always looking to find the next level, this could be a panacea. Finally, for the first time, gamers will have a legacy, a managerial reputation and the possibility to actually make money doing what they love.
So how will it work exactly? Is this like gambling? Is this investment advice? Well ‘no’ and ‘no’ are the loud and resolute answers to those latter two questions. Nifty Football is not like gambling because you, the user, have direct and significant agency in your own success. Furthermore, this is by no means investment advice and should not be used as such. This article is simply for educational purposes, to let you know how the game works and the mechanics by which your time and resourcefulness may or may not result in real world earnings.
XP — the Nifty Football Currency of Success
XP is the native token that makes everything happen in Nifty Football. It is an in-game token that is spent in a number of different ways to improve a user’s team. It is also earned by the team with exploits on the pitch. Earned XP can then be reinvested to further improve the team, resulting in further success, and so on and so forth in a perpetual cycle of improvement and reward.
This constitutes the ecosystem of the game, by which users can organically grow their teams with time and dedication. In between matches you’ll set up your team to play with a certain strategy, assigning roles to players (such as the captaincy and penalty taker) and tinkering with your team selection and formation. On match day you’ll pit your wits against your opponent and make substitutions and tactical changes that all count towards the end result.
Like many aspects of the game, the precise way in which XP is calculated and awarded will evolve during the beta phase, when we’ll observe the experiences of early users and adapt as we go along to create a fair algorithm that is both realistic and rewarding of passion, resourcefulness and tactical ingenuity. For this reason, it will be free to enter the game and indeed there’ll be no money involved at all until the beta phase is complete.
When that happens, there will be another way to get XP besides earning it in the game; you can buy it outright, using Nifty Football’s native token, mentioned earlier, $NFTF. This will allow you to give your team an injection of quality at any point, rather than having to wait to earn the XP organically.
All players will earn XP first and foremost through playing the game, while the option to buy XP in order to gain an advantage is expected to be utilised by the more serious and dedicated users, including those who wish to compete at a high level and actually play to earn.
Why are there Two Tokens?
$NFTF cannot be earned by playing the game. It is the token for buying XP, Nifty NFTs (such as players), and can be staked to provide liquidity. It is a currency with a market value that anyone can buy outside of the game environment.
XP on the other hand, is for playing the game. It is used to improve player quality and it is generated when that player quality brings success in matches. Crucially, XP cannot be traded for anything other than $NFTF. Players wishing to ‘cash-out’ their earned XP can convert it into $NFTF but with a 5% commission going to grassroots football-related charities.
Coaching, Scouting and Other Ways to Earn and Spend XP
Every new player generated in Nifty Football begins low-level and has a maximum potential for improvement. In beta, this potential will be hidden, so you won’t know the true value of any of your players until they’re minted as NFTs in the full version of the game (due for release around the turn of the year). That is when scouts and coaches will form your backroom staff and, according to their badge-level and aptitude, will have the capacity to identify a player’s hidden potential.
Training
The simplest and most direct way to spend XP in order to improve your team is in training. In the My Squad section of the platform dashboard you’ll see all your players represented in the images of their NFTs. Clicking on one will bring you to that player’s dedicated page where you can see a list of his attributes, divided into three categories: mental, physical and on-the-field skills. Every player is generated with a value between 1 and 100 for each attribute and his strengths tend to be reflected in his chosen position. For example, a central defender is likely to be strong and aggressive and have good heading ability, while a winger will need to be fast, skilful and good at crossing.
By clicking on the + to the right of every individual attribute you can choose to spend XP to improve it. A box appears detailing exactly how much XP it will cost for how much improvement.
It’s up to you to decide how to spend the XP you have available: does your star striker need to work more on his finishing or his penalty taking? Does your captain need a course in leadership? Or perhaps your midfield general would be a more complete player if he only improved his work rate.
You can’t do it all before match day, so do you shore up your weaknesses or play to your strengths?
Coaches
How much does it cost then, to improve a given player in a given attribute?
That depends entirely on the quality of your five coaches, categorised as Goalkeeping, Defensive, Midfield, Attacking and Youth. Coaches, just like players, are NFTs in Nifty Football and just like in real life, they vary in quality, with five badge levels to rank them. The better the coach, the more improvement you’ll see for a given amount of XP.
So you may well choose to invest your XP in improving your coaches before you spend it directly on training players, given that this will give you more value for your buck in the long term. However life, and Nifty Football, is not that simple. There’s only so much you can do and so much XP you can spend in a given week before match day and results on the pitch are what earn you XP in the first place. By this logic then, you may wish to make a few urgent improvements to the players directly before you invest in the long-term.
These are the decisions that keep real football managers up at night so get used to it!
A coach will also report to you what he believes a player’s hidden potential to be. This information will be provided as a range, with better coaches being able to narrow down the range and give you a better indication of future value.
Coaches also have a maximum potential for improvement, represented by their aptitude rating. It’s not set in stone yet, but the plan is for more experienced managers to have more ability to accurately assess a coach’s aptitude. As you play the game, your manager NFT records all your achievements and your reputation grows, influencing matches and opening up key insights such as this. Then you can make an informed decision on whether to spend XP trying to improve a coach or to simply replace him with a better one.
Scouts
Scouts are rated in Nifty Football exactly the same way as coaches, with an overall level for their ability supported by an aptitude rating representing their potential for improvement. Unlike coaches however, their sole responsibility is assessing the potential of players outside of your squad.
Again, investing XP on improving a scout or spending $NFTF to buy a new one both represent longer term investments, that in this case will help you do good business in the transfer market. An interesting facet of the game structure here is that a good scout can identify a player with great potential while the owner of that player, if not advised by good quality coaches, may be oblivious to the fact. Take note however — if you suddenly get flattering offers from multiple sources, it’s probably the case that they know something you don’t!
The Treatment Room
It stands to reason that clubs with the finest doctors, physios, nutritionists and so on tend to produce the fittest and most consistent players as well as rehabilitate injured players in a timely and efficient manner. So too in the Niftyverse, where spending XP on your treatment facilities to improve them through the ten levels results in your injury lay-offs being shorter.
However, there is also a fun feature by which Nifty diverges from real life and that is the function to heal an injured player instantly, but it will cost more in XP and you must do it immediately following the match in which the player gets injured. This option exists because Nifty Football squads are created with just 15 players, so two or three incidents of bad luck could mean seriously diminished options for a manager.
We feel it’s essential that Nifty Football remains open to casual players and nobody should be forced to go out and buy new NFTs simply so that they can continue playing the game.
Stadiums
Just like every other aspect of a Nifty Football club, stadiums can be developed with XP in order to later earn XP back through that investment. Bigger and more modern stadiums, along with team performance and manager reputation, results in higher gate receipts, which constitute a multiplier on XP earned on the pitch.
In effect, the raucous crowd is the 12th man! Stadiums themselves are also NFTs and in the long-term future of the game we can foresee magnificent metaverse arenas hosting exhibition matches in front of human, paying supporters!
The Transfer Market
The transfer market is the real juicy aspect for the more enthusiastic players of Nifty Football and the crux of the play-to-earn mechanism. This is the point at which, theoretically, a user can cash in on the NFTs they’ve developed in the game and if they should so choose, go and treat themselves to a nice meal for the day.
Users of the Nifty Football game — anyone who owns their own Manager NFT — will have access to the Nifty Marketplace, where scouts (according to their quality and aptitude) can see the true potential value of players. Transactions take place in the $NFTF token and Nifty takes a 5% commission.
Remember, you can also cash out your excess XP for $NFTF, but there’s a 5% markup that goes to grassroots football-related charities.
Nifty Football NFTs will also be tradable on the open market, though details such as player potential will not be visible. Nevertheless, the NFTs are also collectibles (in fact that was the original concept of Nifty back in 2019) and it’s expected that even some of this second generation of Nifty players will find themselves out of the game, storing value as rare and unique digital artwork by the renowned Stanley Chow.
Indeed the roughly 2,700 player NFTs that were minted in 2019 are still out there, privately owned and changing hands for as much as 5 ETH (roughly $14,000 USD at time of writing). It’s worth noting at this point that plans on how to integrate those ‘OG’ cards in the game are still unformed. Their current market value therefore, is as collectibles, and distinct from any value they might one day have in the game.
Remember when Beckham went to Real Madrid and part of the transfer fee was for his brand?
Nifty Football, Game Changer
The advent of Play-to-Earn (P2E) video-games is one of the most exciting features of Web 3.0 and an example of how this new dawn is already rapidly transforming an entire industry beyond recognition. It was quite beyond the imagination of those of us who were playing Sega and Nintendo in the early 90’s that one day such things could be an income stream for impoverished families.
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Right now, Nifty Football is the very first football management game that utilises NFTs as players. Games like Championship Manager and its successor Football Manager set the bar with a highly addictive product that today has millions of passionate participants and without the brainchild of the Collyer brothers, Nifty Football would not be.
However the fact that Nifty is a decentralised application with plans for DAO governance means that the sky is the limit in terms of how this game can develop.
If you’d like to be involved, follow us on Twitter and join our Discord community, where you can ask us any questions you like. Nifty Football in beta is due out in a matter of weeks from now and the experience of those early users will drive development in its subsequent stages. These are exciting times if you, like many football fans, are prone to fantastical and detailed imaginings of how to manage a team!
Disclaimer: This article is not trading nor investment advice nor financial advice. I am not a financial advisor. The above article is for informational and educational purposes only. Please do your own research before making any financial decision especially purchasing or investing in any stock or digital asset.
