120,000 Fans Interact With Football Stars as The Residency Launches on Somnia
Somnia has partnered with The Residency, a football fan platform connecting supporters with some of the sport’s biggest names. A large userbase is already interacting with their favorite athletes through the app’s chat feature. The integration brings The Residency onto Somnia’s blockchain infrastructure, unlocking onchain features for virtual spaces where fans can meet, talk, and play games with professional footballers.
The Residency has featured A-List players including Federico Valverde of Real Madrid and Rafael Leão of AC Milan, who have joined live chats with supporters.
Following The Residency’s partnership with Somnia, fans logged almost 250,000 interactions with former Arsenal and Chelsea Premier League player Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, just one of the 25+ stars The Residency works with.
During Aubameyang's event, more than 120,000 unique users engaged with the player, quizzing him on everything from favourite moments in his career to favourite teams and everything in between.
Beyond Livestreams: Fans Get to Interact
With The Residency players and fans can talk over text chat, voice chat, take on skill challenges, and participate in mini-games. These experiences will be integrated with Somnia’s high-performance blockchain, which can support millions of transactions per second with sub-cent fees.
Personal brands are more important than ever for athletes, and they’re looking for ways to build genuine communities online. It’s beneficial for fans too, as it allows them to take a more active role in their passions, similar to fantasy sports.
For decades, fan interaction has been static and one-directional. Social media gives the illusion of closeness, but it’s mostly built on broadcasting and algorithms. It’s a one way conversation where assistants and social media managers run promotional pages for famous athletes, but there isn't much of a connection. Fantasy sports gave fans some agency, but it’s still spreadsheet-driven, impersonal, and disconnected from the actual athletes. VIP meet-and-greets are rare, expensive, and only reach a handful of people at a time.
The Residency is building on all of these ideas and more in a new and interactive format that gives fans a deeper connection with their favorite athletes, and provides a great platform for socializing and making friends, which is becoming increasingly important these days, especially with the disappearance of “third places” in public life.
As with sporting events in real life, these virtual events give people a space to socialize and make friends that share their interests. This is especially powerful for football fans living outside of Europe, who rarely get opportunities to attend matches or watch them live. International travel is expensive, so it's basically impossible for many people around the world to see their favorite players and interact, so The Residency is huge for these fans.
Fantasy sports have long served as proof of how deep fans are willing to go to feel involved. In the US alone, over 29 million people participate in fantasy leagues each year. These games generate billions in revenue and keep engagement high even during the off-season. The Residency takes this a step further by allowing fans to engage with real players in real time.
Somnia Scores!
The Residency is unlocking a new category of fan engagement, one that blends gaming, community, and celebrity interaction. Somnia’s infrastructure is designed for this kind of real-time, mass-consumer experience. With over one million transactions per second, sub-second finality, and sub-cent fees, Somnia enables smooth user experiences that feel like Web2 but offer the ownership and composability of Web3.
The Residency will benefit from a high-performance onchain architecture that opens the door for a wide range of new use-cases and features. Somnia, in turn, gains a flagship partner that demonstrates what’s possible when blockchain supports real-time consumer apps at internet scale.
You can download The Residency app now to create an account and see the upcoming schedule!