How it came about

YNWA: For me personally it is interesting because you guys shared a little bit more about what is in the pipeline. It's fascinating to learn about Footium. "Football Manager on the blockchain" is an accurate description or not? When did this start? Your socials are booming after your announcement.

We are developing an NFT Game Management platform where you have to make squads, train and trade your players on the transfer market. Ultimately the idea here is that you compete in a Global League and by doing great, get promoted and win big prizes.

The first step was how to encode the assets (the clubs and the football players) as NFT tokens and we decided to join the Algorand pre-accelerator program to build the game. We are now going full-time on this project.

As you said, Footium is like Football Manager but on the blockchain and that's where the vision is original. We used to play Football Manager and we wanted to bring the decentralized aspect. We are building a real economy. A manager who spends time in the game gets rewards for doing so. You play within real Leagues against real opponents and you have to be competitive on the transfer market as well. By playing Footium, you will be able to win something.

Hibee: The promise of what you are looking to build is great. I look at what you published on Twitter and more attentively about what we can potentially do as managers (build up a squad, develop players in the Academy, train coaches, and look at our weak points). For me, it can be frustrating because we do not have any stake in the game or real ownership. I see that I have no reason for coming back if I do not have my own money there.

To invest in the game, you need to understand that today when you play a video game, you do not produce any assets even if you spend hundreds or thousands of hours.

Where it's going

One of our critical mission is to lower the barrier of entry for the people who want to play the game. Basically, all you need is 11 players so you need to mint 11 players. In order that the incentives to be aligned, we implemented the idea that all clubs have their own academy and by default, all of the Academy players can play in the 1st team if there are on a trial. Of course, if you play the game this way, you won't be very successful.

You can buy on the Primary Market and the Secondary Market.

YNWA: One of the subjects today is to talk about the pre-sales of clubs. So, the clubs are sold as NFTs. Anyone can purchase a club. There is already a game engine in a place where we can compete against other managers. The teams who sign NFT players are going to progress much faster.

Yes, on average, your Academy is going to produce 1 or 2 half-decent players per season. Maybe some other clubs are going to sell their Academy players. Instead of using them, you can sell them.

There is also a new source of players that are Limited Edition of football players that are going to be slightly better than players from the Academy.

YNWA: One of the questions that I have is, as you are in numbers, will you build an in-game economy that will have some meaning, do the game will be an economic simulator that has a minor in football, or is this going to be a football game that also has minor or major in economics?

To allow a Football Management game to actualize fully, it is necessary to align incentives and monitor the quality of training, for example. We crafted the game around parameters to make sure the value will be maintained.

It's gonna start on Ethereum and 3060 NFT football clubs: 12 per division and 8 Tiers.

Sir0B note: It is pretty technical while listening to understand the tokenomics. I encourage you to go on Footium's Discord to ask you questions, and from here, there could be some mistakes as I am not an English native speaker and do not know so much about Footium.

Footium clubs

Hibee: How do you onboard new players when the 3060 football clubs are sold?

We can scale by adding more Tiers or expanding to new chains.

YNWA: One of the other exciting things is that a season in Footium is gonna be between 1 and 3 weeks. Is that correct?

Yes, a season is two weeks. We want to encourage active gameplay and see the development of football players in the game. A player can progress and achieve an entire career within six months or a year.

One of our ideas is to run in real-time, but I think that people will get bored of that too quickly.

Hibee: I agree, it is not fast enough. Those short 2-3 week cycles do work quite well. I have seen them in other games, and they are great.

YNWA: Even speaking about division, if within a few weeks it would be possible to move from Division 5 to Division 4 quickly and that would be appreciable.

You are absolutely right because also, from a user perspective, it is hard to understand that he will buy a club and that he will need a year to be on top.

YNWA: After 6 months, and correct me if I'm wrong, there will be some clubs that nobody is taking care of. What will they become? Does each division have its economy?

We want to experiment in different ways, and by testing different game economies, we will have an idea pretty soon. Theoretically, each week can be self-funded, so if you use Footium tokens, you could mint players to get them out of your academy, and there will be fees attached to these minted tokens. The generated money can be used as a reward for the League. Not everything gets filtered off to the top teams.

YNWA: You could have a scenario where Division 1 teams pay a certain amount of money for a Division 8 youth prospect, and that money spent on the transfer is available to be won by all the other teams in that Division 8.

Yes, that's exactly right, and it is how we would like to incentivize just because your club is not a the top does not mean that you cannot produce a really good player. It should be based on what happens in real football, and sometimes a lower club produces the next start talent. We want also low division managers to be engaged a lot in the game.

YNWA: Because there are so many variables that you can apply to the game, you need to have every single variable link to each other, and clubs need to be linked to each other. Like in real football, you have clubs with great managers but insufficient financial support. If you can reproduce that, and again, we have been speaking about how true you want the game to be, and I understand that you do not want to be blocked by too many "Arcade" features.

Yeah, you got it. We could have power-ups, and we could have NFTs. If, for example, a player is injured, you can speed up the recovery time by using an NFT and/or the prize money won as a reward. There are plenty of options.

To conclude, it is precisely where we need to find the balance between real-life and football "Arcade" features.

One of the things that we wanna do is that we want to keep it as realistic as possible. Speaking about the roadmap, we want people to play this game as early as possible because we think that we can speculate about these features and we can talk, but the community will speak while playing, and this will allow us to get the knowledge of which features are the best.

One of the most waiting features is a "freeze of player age".

YNWA: Yeah, like Steven Gerrard froze at 38 years old! One of the questions I had is when the sales of the clubs will take place, how the clubs will come out? With their own identities? Because on Sorare, you can customize the banner, the name, etc... How will this work on Footium?

Yes, they will be fixed to start. Maybe in the future, we will allow people to customize using the Footium tokens to change the name, the badge, or the football kit.

We started with English names because we know the most. But maybe in the future, all the Polygon clubs will have Spanish names, and all the BSC clubs will be Italian, etc... There are thousands of ideas. Or maybe we can make a mix of them, some Spanish teams mixed with Italian teams. We are curious to see what does the community want.

YNWA: Personally, the more I can customize my team, the better it is. So by winning Footium tokens, if I can use them to change my kit or other stuff, that would be great.

We will start with the club's teams and see where to go. But yes, we can also organize a world cup and other side games like cross-chain competitions. I see also DAOs being involved.

YNWA: Do you also see DAOs attracted to this type of club structure on a club-by-club basis? Because, in my mind, it can potentially go to a scholarship as well where you have got people playing regularly for DAO and climbing up in divisions.

Of course, you will see the top clubs that will be run and founded by DAOs.

I think that you will see the lower division teams managed by "normal" people that just want to play the game for fun and also big guys that will draw again each other.

Hibee: There are tons of ways this game can develop. You also worked on Legends cards. Can you please tell us a little bit more about them? What can they do for your club?

The Legends are completely Unique Super Stars cards, and I suppose you can see them the same way you look at Sorare Unique cards. They will be for all of the players a "1 of a kind" card, but the Legends will be game-changing. They going to be like Messi and Ronaldo. We will probably mint 20 to 100 of them to sell them off. They are going to have some special unique designs. We will generate images based on individual components. The Legends will be ultimately unique, so a specific design, but also because they will be Super Stars.

Hibee: Just coming back to the gameplay element. We have got tactics here.

Yes, you will be able to choose your starting eleven. Currently, we do not have in-game tactics, but that is something we are working on.

Hibee: What will be the benefits of being online?

You can set the team for a particular day, but choosing the starting eleven will be better than letting the computer choose for you. It is also possible to automate, but we want to encourage gameplay.

Hibee: It will be interesting to see how many users will be active.

YNWA: For me, the club is the value, but there might be a club assistant that might help to run your club during your absence.

What's coming next

To summarize:

• Announcing club sales
• All of the assets will be ready at the end of November
• Designs
• Onboarding new developers
• Starting the game as soon as possible for early adopters