On Thursday morning, the Washington Post carried an interview with Eben Smith. Smith is one of the co-founders of the WAGMI United group, a collection of crypto backers who claim they are about to revolutionise the ownership model of English football despite admitting that none of them have any expertise in the sport.
Why is it that these people always aim so damn high? Why is it always “change the way planet earth and the metaverse views sport” rather than “have a decent EFL Cup run?” or “beat Carlisle United home and away”? Or, as in this case, “be on the leading edge of a revolution in how sports franchises are run”. There’s your first mistake; we tend to say club.
WAGMI United aim to raise their capital through the sale of club-branded non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Firstly, a brief explainer: NFTs are one-of-a-kind digital products that have no physical form but can be bought or sold (the best analogy is with the 1990s craze for “buy a star” or “buy a plot on the moon” gifts; in effect you gained nothing other than the certificate). NFTs have links to cryptocurrency, an online currency that is decentralised (not controlled by Governments or banks) and so liable to fluctuation.
When wading into unfamiliar matters, it is important to keep an open mind. Not understanding something doesn’t make it wrong, however much it makes you wince and eventually want to scream. I’m merely including that as a disclaimer, because things are about to get scream-y. According to New York Times reporter Tariq Panja, the lucky club is Bradford City.
The make-up of this group is vaguely generic, if emphatically modern. There’s a sports gambling analyst, a derivatives trader turned NFT dealer, the president of a US sports team, the chairman of a communications agency and a TikTok sensation who sit alongside some unnamed associates in the NFT and crypto world, a list that is beginning to sound like the most unwatchable version of I’m A Celebrity in history.
On the face of it, and if you squint to avoid the deep set environmental, ethical and financial concerns about the rise of cryptocurrency, you can just about make a case for this as an ambitious ownership model. Rather than shares, supporters would own an NFT that they might generously interpret as a piece of their club. The WAGMI United group would then use the capital raised to fuel the club’s progress (they are particularly keen to invest in data analytics).
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Man Utd vs Brighton becomes fifth game postponed as Covid crisis hits the Premier League16 December, 2021And yet – if you will forgive the cynicism because it’s just about all I’ve got here – it is an idea that provokes a dozen questions to rush into your mind so quickly you immediately need to jot them down to avoid getting a headache. What if Bradford City (or any other club’s) supporters don’t want to buy NFTs – which most of them won’t? Do you even care if the NFTs are bought by Bradford fans, or is this simply an attempt to raise cash from the gullible? What’s the great goal here, to create a successful club or simply use it as a platform for promotion of NFTs (and thus crypto)? And what happens if it takes a long time to progress through the leagues – which it will – and you get bored along the way?
This idea would be easier – perhaps even easy – to stomach were they starting from scratch. Pick an area, form a new football club, register with the Football Association and the lowest-ranked league, advertise your grand NFT masterplan and see if anyone bites. If nothing else, it would be interesting to see if their goal to change a supposedly broken ownership model succeeded relatively victim-free. For the record, nobody at WAGMI United is yet to explain why or how the current model is broken, or why or how selling NFTs to supporters fixes it.
But we are talking about Bradford City. This is a club with a 118-year history, a club with tradition, a club that has worked tirelessly to forge deep connections with every section of its local community. Valley Parade isn’t just a football stadium; it’s a place where people find escape and find friendship. This club, like every other, has a heritage, something that is uniquely Bradford City. This type of owner threatens to whitewash that heritage just because they can and just because they think it can be profitable.
Bigger than any fear of the impact upon any of Bradford City’s intangibles – heritage, history, identity – are the practical worries about what happens if this experiment doesn’t pay off.
“Our hope is that it works; there’s not that much downside if it doesn’t,” says Smith as the final words of that feature. You would hope that the author deliberately placed it at the end thus creating the never-ending dramatic pause as we list the ways in which Smith is wrong.
There might not be much downside to Smith and his crypto crew, but unsurprisingly he hasn’t considered the mess that might get left behind. A club that was used like a petri dish, a real-life version of Football Manager that you can quit without saving, would be changed forever. You would skip along to your next vanity project without a care in the world.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps you can get to the Premier League by selling some gifs to people on the internet. Perhaps Bradford City fans will embrace life at the DogecoinDome. Perhaps NFTs of Robbie Blake will suddenly become the must-have digital token. The lasting, longing hope is that we never get a chance to find out.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3mds6c9
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