Towards the end of Squid Game mania, a new cryptocurrency linked to Netflix’s South Korean phenomenon was launched.
For the few remaining members of the global population who are yet to see it, Squid Game is a gruesome thriller series that tells the story of a group of people drowning in debt who are chosen to play a secret, deadly game with the chance to win a life-changing fortune. It received mixed reviews in South Korea, but sent Westerners, who clearly couldn’t get enough of the idea of poor people being sadistically murdered as they tried desperately to clear their debts, wild.
In late October, Squid, a cryptocurrency claiming it was required to play an upcoming video game, started trading at one cent. Within a week, its value leapt to $2,856 (£2,125). I first became aware of it when a story popped up in my Google News feed explaining how the coin’s value had soared by 45,000 per cent.
That didn’t scream: quick, I need to invest now to ride the rest of that crypto wave! My first thought was: huh, that sounds pretty dodgy. And so it turned out to be.
There were a few red flags – buyers not being able to sell their tokens was a big one, and that the company’s website was full of typos and grammatical errors.
Then, a week after a company emerged from nowhere and somehow convinced people to hand over millions, it was gone. The owners walked away with around £2.5m, according to reports. It’s known as a “rug pull”.
Yet even though stories such as these are emerging all the time, for some reason people cannot resist staring up at that giant shining piggy-bank full of money and believing if they play just one more time that prize could be theirs. And football isn’t helping.
Players are quick to promote iffy schemes and NFTs – non-fungible tokens – they know nothing about, while clubs are lured by big sponsorship deals from a dangerously unregulated market.
It is thought that crypto is slowly replacing the morally questionable but lucrative revenue stream from gambling sponsorship, and, in fact, many elements of gambling can be found in crypto-based “investments”.
The prospect that if they are bought now their value could rocket in the coming months – or days, in the case of the Squid Game crypto. The investment replicates the wager the gambler places on a bet. The stake can return huge rewards, or be lost. Like gambling, losses can run higher and higher – causing them to be chased. And the losses can spiral out of control, in the same way they do with a gambling addict.
Take the crypotcurrency Dogecoin, for example. Dogecoin was created in 2013 as a joke about the spectacular rise and fall of cryptocurrencies’ value. It is an eight-year-old gag that has found its way onto the sleeve of Premier League side Watford.
At the start of 2021, Dogecoin’s value rocketed and caused a frenzy online. Then it plummeted, meaning those who got in when it was high will be counting the losses of a bad bet. Featuring on Watford’s shirt adds a gloss of legitimacy.
Equally, footballers are influencers – they were influencers before the term ever existed – and in some cases they are providing authenticity to financial products that are unable to gain Financial Conduct Authority approval (and some have tried, only to flee as soon as the FCA started asking awkward questions).
Some have no idea what they are endorsing as they cash their significant cheques. After The Athletic – who have done excellent work investigating this murky, complex world – shared concerns with Thiago Silva’s agent, the Chelsea defender suspended his relationship with a digital token that soared in value after promotion by a series of high-profile footballers, then plummeted.
What all this, ultimately, highlights is football’s insatiable obsession with money above all else, no matter the consequences: the super-rich still so keen for that next payday they are willing to sign up to anything, no matter the harm it could do.
The problem is, as the parable of Squid Game suggests, the fun and games of the rich can easily hurt those who can ill afford it.
Won’t someone think of children?
After mentioning the BBC report about four-year-old Zayn Ali Salman being scouted by Arsenal’s academy in this column a couple of weeks ago, Sky Sports News clearly decided they did not want to be accused of missing out on the next big thing.
Last week, SSN produced a two-minute feature on “The next Lionel Messi?” – who happened to be a seven-year-old playing at Liverpool’s academy. Can we let these children grow up a bit, first?
It must be hard for ratings-chasing TV channels to avoid the allure of a child with 5.8 million followers on Instagram. That’s almost one-and-a-half million more than Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson, the turtle-necked presenter says in the report. “Sorry Jordan, it’s the world we’re living in,” he adds.
Quite, and what a weird world that’s become.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3DkzHfm
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