Panini has long been a staple of the sports and entertainment collectibles industry. In 1961, the company, founded by the four Panini brothers in Modena, Italy, started with stickers of soccer players. Eventually, the brothers grew the business to form a relationship with the World Cup in 1970 and have produced the Fifa World Cup sticker collection every four years ever since.

The company then won the exclusive license to the National Basketball Association (NBA) for trading cards and stickers and furthered their entry into U.S. sports when they made inroads into the National Football League (NFL) and the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA). Panini took over the exclusive relationship with the NFL in 2015.

The next year, the company launched its digital trading card apps – NFL Blitz for football and Panini Dunk for basketball. The apps still exist today and people can collect digital trading cards within the apps, but in 2020, Panini launched its blockchain platform for NFT card trading on its website.

“No one was talking about NFTs in January of 2020 – it was about sixteen months before Dapper Labs came in and everything changed to people talking about NFTs,” Jason Howarth, senior vice president (SVP) of marketing and athlete relations for Panini America, said to me in a recent interview. “We launched our blockchain platform in January 2020 where we had cards that were digital assets tied to physical cards.”

By having trading card licenses for the NFL, NBA, the MLBPA, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), La Liga and other soccer leagues, Panini was in a prime position to offer physical trading cards as well as powering NFTs for the biggest leagues in sports.

“We continue to sell all of our products in USD on our blockchain platform because we felt – at the time in January of 2020 – no one fully understood the idea or concept of going out and purchasing cryptocurrency and then having a crypto wallet,” Howarth said. “We wanted to make it as easy as possible for consumers to consume our product, so we tied it to USD – which has been very beneficial for us given the current crypto marketplace – and it gave the mainstream collectors an understanding of what the value of a digital asset might be [in USD] because they’re used to consuming the product from a physical perspective.”

But not all Panini NFTs are created with a corresponding physical card, and not all physical cards are created with a corresponding digital asset.

Panini recently relaunched its digital marketplace to provide more tools for its customers to understand the quantity of one-to-one cards in the marketplace and what the high price and floor price of an individual card could be – all to help users be more savvy. If customers are looking for a specific card, the marketplace tools give them an idea of what they can expect to pay for it as well.

The revamped marketplace also aims to bring greater awareness to the Panini company as a whole and remind collectors of the company’s legacy physical brand that’s been powering a new wave of digital assets.

“When we launched the blockchain platform in January of 2020, it was purely individual cards,” Howarth said. “In July of 2021, we moved to a pack format and first launched with UFC and then followed that up with the MLBPA, the NBA, and then the NFL. With all of our products now there’s the ability to buy the individual asset or in a pack format.”

Attempting to keep the experience of opening a physical card pack consistent with its NFT packs, Panini focused on developing the element of surprise – the “not knowing” what’s in a digital pack – which is native to opening physical cards.

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Whether a consumer is opening a physical or digital pack, Panini has leverage amongst its competitors in the NFT-trading-card space because of its history as a physical trading card company. With competitors like Top Shot, there are no printed physical cards that can be combined with digital assets.

“We have the ability to tie a physical card to an NFT asset, and even if it's purely an NFT asset, there’s a variation of that product or brand that lives in the physical world,” Howarth said. “People understand that with the PRIZM brand – on the physical side – a one-of-one of Luca Doncic would bring in a certain amount of dollars, so there’s an equation or level of acceptance that the one-of-one NFT version could bring in a certain value as well,” he said. 

He continued, “A perfect example of this is with our World Cup product. Right after the tournament, our World Cup PRIZM product was released on our site in NFT form. Someone spent $10 on a pack and pulled a one-of-one Lionel Messi black. There’s only one of those assets, and someone had already put a bounty on the card on the marketplace for $30,000. Within 48 hours, the one-of-one Messi black sold for $32,000.”

While Panini’s Discord community focuses on its digital assets over the physical assets, the opportunities Panini is bringing on the virtual side include real world experiences.

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The most recent example was based around UFC 285 in Miami, where Panini brought the winners of one of their NFT contests to Miami for a VIP experience of the fight. The night before, the winners went for a steak dinner joined by UFC star Amanda Nunes to hang out, talk about fighting and sign memorabilia for them. The following week, a different contest winner announced a draft pick at the NFL Draft in Kansas City.

“In this way, Panini is generating unique integrations that tie to the value of being part of the PaniniNFT community, which allows you to have the opportunity to get these kinds of experiences,” Howarth said. 

Connecting everyday experiences to the digital NFT world is a main goal of the company now, he said. 

“We’re going to continue to dive in and provide experiential opportunities in the real world to the NFT marketplace,” Howarth said. “That’s something we’re always looking at and working towards, finding out what those next elements will be and where they go across NFL, NBA, soccer and UFC.”