How Crypto Crept Into the FIFA World Cup
And the precedent it sets in sports betting and major club branding
Future Perspectives is a bi-weekly newsletter round-up of my essays from the frontier of digital money, governance and organization. For more info on my REST API technical writing for Fintech companies please visit www.andrewgillick.com
The presence of Crypto.com on advertising boards at every game in the FIFA World Cup is confirmation — as if we needed it — that crypto’s primary use-case is gambling.
Seeing the ads you may have wondered why the hell a company is trying to sell you money at a soccer game, in a world awash with money… the idiom of “selling sand to the Arabs” springs to mind.
Not only that but sports biggest star and the most followed man on Instagram with half-a-billion followers, Cristiano Ronaldo, has been paid to by Binance to promote their NFTs on his Instagram profile throughout the tournament.
You may at this point be wondering WTF a Cristiano Ronaldo Fan Token is?
This article documents crypto’s creep into sports over the past 2 years and the precedent it sets in sports betting and club branding. Fittingly, the doomed exchange FTX spent the most lavishly sponsoring NBA, MLB and F1 teams and stadiums and buying endorsements from sports stars like Tom Brady.
Manufacturing Content
Every startup acts as a mini media company to generate network effects of customers, and every company in the crypto industry is a startup. Moreover, they are startups with products that no one needs.
Thus many companies, not just exchanges, have turned to the lowest common denominator to dupe the public to buy their products: sports punters.
Sports betting and retail trading companies have become more prolific sponsors of top sports clubs in the past decade, perhaps as consequence of low interest rates, cheap money and its attendant increase in risk appetite.
From my experience working with crypto startups in various parts of the ecosystem (research, data analysis, media, trading) there is a very thin veil between information and crypto propaganda, which, admittedly I have also peddled the latter on occasion.
Over the years I’ve worked through the whole gambit of ICOs, IEOs, STOs, DeFi. But NFTs have shown just how quick and easy it is to create an illusion of artificial scarcity and value in the digital economy.
Fan Tokens, or NFTs, may be the next evolution in sports betting.
Crypto Marketing, Making New Lows
As I mentioned the crypto industry and business model is just a microcosm of the wider dubious retail trading/investing industry.
Several big name sports betting and ‘spread betting’ (CFD) exchanges that have pivoted to fully-fledged crypto exchanges in the past three years.
Along with private Telegram group chats to drop coins on thousands of ‘community members’ from a bought contact list, crypto marketing has joined the sports betting and gambling companies in sponsoring mainstream football teams, likely to lure in the betting public.
Crypto gambling companies have sponsored England’s top soccer clubs, Tottenham Hotspurs and Watford in a league synonymous with sports betting.
Perhaps most surreptitiously and bizzarely, in 2021 Tezos became the “official blockchain” and NFT creator of Manchester United. Almost every major team in the soccer world now has a form of NFT partnership and offering Fan Tokens used to “deepen fan engagement” and make money.
CFD trading platform E-Toro has been one of the most shameless shillers of crypto and sport sponsors of the past three years, sponsoring major leagues from the English Premier League to Australian Rugby.
In the most self-serving crypto propaganda I’ve ever read, at the start of the Covid pandemic as millions of people were dying and thousands of productive businesses that employed millions closed overnight, the E-Toro US Managing Director exclaimed how the pandemic would be a boon for the crypto industry and that it was now impervious to economic cycles!
The reputation and public image of the crypto industry has declined even since the scam artist infamy of the ICO days. Nor is there any evidence that the swamp has been drained.
Narrative Economics
Robert Shiller describes this Narrative Economics phenomenon brilliantly in his study of financial ‘epidemics’.
Just like diseases, when narratives go viral the original strain mutates to a variation of the story to keep it going and infecting new minds.
We have seen this mutation in crypto narratives since Bitcoin emerged as ‘digital gold’, to ‘programmable money’, ICOs, STOs, IEOs and lately DeFi (and others in between) that enabled cryptocurrency to persist for so many years in people’s imagination without having any productive use case.
Conclusion
When your business model is selling people “money” (the product) to speculate with (the service), and you can print as much of your own money to entice more people (Fan tokens/NFTs) then what you’re left with is a pyramid built on perception and deception.
Crypto.com’s presence at the Fifa World Cup is a reminder that even during the industry’s most disgraceful low point it has a pernicious access to the echelons of big business.
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