Not a Footium Blog

Is 2026 the year of Footium?

Hello everyone! Apologies for the extended hiatus from the blog, I have had a lot (A LOT) going on! However, there’s been some super exciting stuff going on in the world of Footium.

• Dimitar Berbatov is here, and storming his way to Division 1!
• Our mighty Marrouck Villa are up to Division 5, and looking good on their way to Division 4 within the next few seasons.
• Free Agents have been here for a couple of seasons.
• SquadScoutPro has launched, funded by a Footium Community Grant.
• Caretaker Leagues are going strong, and bringing in more players all the time!
• Rewards continue, with thousands being paid out every month!

So, is 2026 really the year of Footium?

The ‘NFT Gaming’ context

Whether we want to admit it or not, the wider context is that NFT gaming, and crypto in general, are in a far different space to where they were at the dizzy heights of 2021/2022. While crypto continues to reach greater heights every few months, the same can’t be said for NFTs. This leads to a strange contrast where we are buying using NFTs at a time when crypto values are extremely high, but NFT revenue and interest is low.

Bitcoin, for example, sits at around $90,000. Ethereum is still over $3,000. Crypto is at a market cap of over $3 Trillion. Contrast this with a handy tool like OpenSea sales over time, and you’ll see that NFT sale volume last month was $104 million, but this is down from a high of $5 billion. That’s around a 98% drop.

There was a time when everyone wanted to throw NFTs into everything. We all remember Ubisoft Quartz. But that time has passed, for now, with a lot of embarrassing news stories for projects in the interim; whether that’s Axie Infinity getting hacked or the many, many, many poor iterations of Zed Run, where horses are now worth 10 cents in a game that was once seen as the future of NFT gaming.

This is where Footium comes in.

Footium is:

• Stable, both in terms of it’s economy but also its size and scalability.
• Built around the world’s most popular sport.
• Supported by a dedicated team, who have not fallen into the traps of many other projects.
• Very community driven, where you can put names to faces and feel part of a community.
• Much more easily accessible than many NFT projects.
• Working with established stars & organisations, giving more credibility.

The ecosystem is still tricky, but Footium has avoided falling into the traps that many other projects have fallen into. Whether that’s massively expanding far too quickly, getting hacked or killing the in game economy, that hasn’t happened.

NFTs likely will come back around, as everything does, and Footium is already in a place to capitalise on the interest when it comes back.

The Gameplay Situation

Footium has very nicely been giving us updates as we go along. Academy players, Free Agents, Coaching slots, it all adds to the depth of the game.

One of the key reasons for player churn, however, is players starting the game, getting invested, buying multiple teams and then struggling to keep all the plates spinning.

Footium has a high retention rate (as those involved in the project have already made clear), but suffers from churn. People want to play more Footium, but in doing so may spread themselves too thin and then move on. I, for example, have three clubs, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t disproportionately focus on 2 out of 3 of those clubs.

The team are aware of this, and have made more of a Duolingo-style experience, where you can log in for 5 to 10 minutes each day, rather than seeing your life pass by through doomscrolling and gambling-like gameplay loops. It’s a much more ethical and sustainable way to drive engagement.

We know that more will come, and updates will keep rolling out. But I do think more depth added to the core gameplay loop will ultimately pay dividends. There’s a lot of untapped potential, whether that’s introducing Tournaments, Friendlies & Pre-Season Matches or expanding on the role of the Stadium, Attendances and Supporter personalities. Look at Marrouck Villa – our supporters ‘sometimes get outsung by opposition supporters’, maybe we could be investing in the stadium to ensure we get better turnouts and better morale for players? Just a thought!

The foundations are well and truly laid out with Footium, but how this is expanded on is key. An exciting and well-run project is already here, and it’s how we take it to the next level.

Social Media & ‘Hype’

The social media and community elements of Footium are so key. It’s a game that actively encourages social media participation, and makes social crossover a key part of the game itself. This continues to drip feed attention and clicks onto the game, and will bring in new players.

Now, however, is a really tricky time for some Social Media. Whatever the hell Elon Musk is doing with X, there’s a lot of people not on board. We stepped away from it for that reason. Footium has done a great job of balancing social engagement with not excluding people (you don’t want all your giveaways, for example, to be run through Social Media and exclude people who don’t use it), but there is a need for a spotlight to be shone on the project.

Dimitar Berbatov is a statement signing in more ways than one. He lends legitimacy to the project and has a huge following which will be interested in Footium. “Football Manager for real money” is a fantastic selling point. This will generate hype, and I hope the proof is there that the hype can be turned into lasting users.

Where am I at?

Footium is still going strong for me. I log in every day and manage 3 teams in a variety of low to mid divisions. Sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose. But it’s a key part of my routine and the excitement is still there for me every time we pull in winnings.

I’m not shouting as much as I was, but maybe I should be!

So, is 2026 the year of Footium?

I sincerely think it might be.

See you all on the pitch.