WePlay, a slick looking social network for sports fans, players, coaches and anyone in any way involved in sports, has raised a first round of financing from Pequot Private Equity, CAA and MLB (that's Major Leage Baseball!). They pulled down $1.87 million in this round according to PEHub, as well as a number of high profile members of professional sports.
I gave the site a good once over, and it seemed like a solid, quick running site, and did in fact have official looking profiles for people like Peyton Manning, Lebron James and Derek Jeter. Unfortunately, it didn't look much like any of those folks had done anything with their profile but accept friend requests, which makes me wonder exactly what use the site had for them in terms of draws for new users.
(Editor's note: the folks from WePlay called us to clarify that they bought the WePlay domain recently, and that historic traffic graphs don't have much to do with the current site owners. I've changed the title to reflect this.)
While other examples don't immediately spring to mind, this doesn't seem like the first time I've done funding stories on failing websites, and I have to wonder exactly how much due diligence that these funding firms do, or exactly what sort of pitchman you need to hire to get these sorts of deals.