Britain’s Gambling Commission is to prosecute Sorare, a multibillion-pound company that makes a fantasy football game promoted by the Premier League, for providing unlicensed gambling.

Sorare, which is valued at $4.3bn (£3.21bn) and counts major international investment firms such as SoftBank among its backers, will appear in court on 4 October in what will be an extremely rare use of the gambling regulator’s prosecutorial powers. The company denies the charge of unlicensed gambling.

Developed in 2018 by Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort, Sorare describes itself as a fantasy sport cryptocurrency-based video game. Players can create their own “football club” with cards in the form of tradable non-fungible tokens (NFTs), competing for prizes including cash, VIP tickets and signed kits.

The commission said in October 2021 that it was investigating whether the products provided by the Paris-based firm were online gambling and required a licence.

Almost exactly three years later, the regulator has now charged the company with offering unlicensed gambling, with the company due to appear in Birmingham magistrates court.

Since the Gambling Commission was established in 2005, it is thought to have used its prosecutorial powers only once, in a case of cheating involving a man who had drugged dogs to fix greyhound races.

A spokesperson for Sorare said: “We are aware of the claims made by the Gambling Commission and have instructed our UK counsel to challenge them. We firmly deny any claims that Sorare is a gambling product under UK laws.

“The commission has misunderstood our business and wrongly determined that gambling laws apply to Sorare. We cannot comment further whilst legal proceedings are under way.”

Sorare’s website boasts of partnerships with major leagues and 317 clubs around the world, including every Premier League club and European giants such as Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

It has promoted its games via an ad campaign featuring the French striker Kylian Mbappé and also claims to have partnerships in the US, with the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball.

In 2023, the Premier League granted Sorare a four-year licence to sell digital sports cards of players from all 20 Premier League clubs, a deal Sky News said at the time could be worth £30m a year.

A section on the Premier League website lists Sorare among the league’s partners.

The page states that Sorare also counts the sportspeople Serena Williams, Lionel Messi, Zinedine Zidane, Rio Ferdinand, Antoine Griezmann, Gerard Piqué, Blake Griffin, and Rudy Gobert among its investors, ambassadors and advisers.

The Premier League website describes Sorare as one of Europe’s fastest-growing startups, pointing to a recent $680m (£508m) fundraising effort that valued the company at $4.3bn.

Investors in Sorare include SoftBank, Accel and Benchmark. The company, which employs 160 people in New York and Paris, boasts of having 3 million users in 180 markets.

The Gambling Commission said it had charged Sorare with “providing unlicensed gambling facilities to consumers in Britain” but that it could not comment further.

The Guardian has approached the Premier League for comment and has attempted to reach Sorare and its founders.