With pretty much any major innovation somebody’s nose is put out of joint.
Uber upended traditional taxi firms and attracted the fury of black cab drivers. Music streaming service Spotify threatened the music industry and its record labels. Amazon is destroying the High Street and many longstanding retail brands.
And so the emergence of Socios – the world’s first “fan token” platform – in the past 18 months has not been without controversy. A company, who use blockchain to offer a limited number of fan tokens that can be bought and sold, that was “a nobody” 18 months ago now has over a hundred staff in offices around the world, was met with resistance when they made their first move into English football by signing a partnership with West Ham in 2019.
Amidst a period of discontent between the club’s ownership and supporters, West Ham fan groups joined forces and argued Socios was a way of monetising supporters. The Football Supporters’ Association weighed in, claiming it went against an informal commitment by leagues and clubs that fan engagement would remain free.
As always, there are multiple sides to all stories and, in this case, none are necessarily right or wrong. Socios chief executive Alexandre Dreyfus told me that what happened in the West Ham case has been told inaccurately.
He is adamant they broke off the deal with West Ham not because of the fan backlash but because they signed Barcelona afterwards and, when Covid emerged making planned launch initiatives with West Ham impossible, decided to concentrate on “bigger fish”.
Dreyfus, 43, is an interesting character who could yet shape the future of European football. He is a French internet entrepreneur who has been founding online companies for the past quarter of a century. In 1996, he created France’s online-only equivalent of Time Out magazine, selling it seven years later then moving into the sports betting and poker sphere. He sold another business in 2012, started exploring sports and fan-engagement four years ago then invented Socios (and Chiliz, the blockchain company that makes it work).
Socios, however, did not break into football overnight, rather a snowball that began its descent eighteen months ago has quickly gathered pace. They have since signed up Paris Saint-Germain, Barcelona, Juventus, AC Milan, a number of clubs in Turkey and, following that false-start into the Premier League, last week announced Manchester City as their first members of English football, launching the “$CITY Fan Token”.
Manchester City were aware that West Ham’s move into the technology was met with resistance, spent a long time considering the proposals (they were in talks with Socios for two years, Dreyfus says) and decided to head off potential opposition from their traditional fanbases by handing free fan tokens to all their current Cityzens members.
To those who argue that it is a way to monetise fans and shut local, match-going fans out of club decisions, Dreyfus counters that it is merely a way to engage with supporters on a global scale.
The overriding point of contention is not the perks and awards that come with owning a token, but the idea that token holders will be able to vote on exclusive decisions that affect the fan experience.
That is the key selling point of an explainer on Socios’s YouTube channel that declares by becoming a member you can “make decisions on club-related matters via a popular vote”.
Concept in action, at Juventus last year the club conducted a vote of fan token holders on what music should be played when the team score. For almost a decade, The Fratellis’ Chelsea Dagger played from the stadium sound system every time they scored, but after a vote on Socios, Blur’s Song 2 replaced it.
Clubs will be wise to choose their Socios polls wisely: imagine had the technology been adopted at West Ham and fans around the world voted to lock the prematch bubble machine in a London Stadium storage cupboard and throw away the key…
If all goes to plan, voting on the platform could have significant impact. One of Dreyfus’s ambitions is that clubs signed up to the platform could play summer preseason tournaments and token holders will vote on the format and where they are held.
You can see both sides of the issue: why local “hardcore” fans could be angered by the sense that their importance is ebbing away, but also the feeling from fans abroad that they have a right to be considered as supporters.
Dreyfus’s view is that major football clubs want to be global brands and therefore their local supporters have to accept this is the future.
“I understand sometimes historical local fans don’t want to acknowledge there is a global fanbase but that’s the case today: you have to live with it,” Dreyfus says. “This global fanbase is what gives the club the ability to have the best players.
“You have fans everywhere in the world and not recognising these fans is discrimination. If you do not accept that a fan in Japan who spends hundreds of dollars buying a jersey and watching the team, he’s not entitled to be a fan because he was not born in the city, that’s discrimination. We believe the future of football is more engagement with fans all over the world.
Perhaps describing Socios users as “super fans” or “Fan 2.0”, as Dreyfus does, or in adverts claiming “you’re more than a fan” could be inflammatory to those supporters who turn up every week and have passed a passion for a club through generations but do not agree with the fan token system.
Engagement on the Socios app – forum chat, voting, buying and selling tokens, hunting for them in the real world in much the same way people find Pokemon in Pokemon Go – even gives users a score and ranks them in leaderboards, amplifying the idea that one fan is somehow better than the next.
Perhaps Dreyfus simply sees fans in a different way to traditionalists. “A Premier League fan will most likely love two teams, the city he is coming from and another one, then he is also liking Juventus due to Cristiano Ronaldo, Barcelona due to Lionel Messi. That’s why we’re adding more teams to the platform: 52 per cent of users have tokens of two teams, and 38 per cent own three or more.” They have “almost 750,000 users” and the UK is not even in their top 10 market.
The FSA remains concerned. The body intend to speak with supporter groups and their members at Manchester City. “There should be no financial barriers to engaging with your football clubs,” their chief executive Kevin Miles says.
More on the Premier League
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- Young-Myles: The case for Spurs retaining Mourinho is diminishing by the week
- The making of Everton’s versatile defender whose rise surprised even his own manager
- Hall: Martial is running out of chances to prove he is part of the future at Man Utd
- The Czech ‘warriors’ who rose from obscurity to fire West Ham into European contention
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3tN2SCM
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