Football cards get on the Blockchain and Captain Kirk from Star Trek joins in too

Believe it or not the size of the global sports memorabilia industry is $5.4 Billion according to Forbes, so it is no surprise that  Fantastec have bought in PwC as their exclusive Blockchain Partner as it looks to target leading football clubs in England and Europe.

The capacity that even the biggest clubs such as Arsenal football club at 60,260 is tiny, even if they are successful and manage to increase their stadium’s capacity to 90,000, compared to its global fan base.

Arsenal followers:

Facebook 37.5million

Instagram 13.5 million

Twitter 14.1 million

Global fans 125 million

Source :https://travel.zeelo.co/the-top-15-biggest-and-most-supported-football-teams-in-the-world/

Football teams, given the size of their global fan base, are keen to explore ways that they can reach out to their fans, and doing this digitally is very cost effective and helps to explain clubs interest in Fantastec. This is a company which offers “digital football cards” (soccer cards for our cousins across The Pond) to collect and swap and then gain access to players videos and special memorabilia.

Talking about Americans, Captain Kirk aka, William Shatner has just announced his involvement with Mattereum, a London based lawtech firm, who are also who are also addressing the issues around authenticity of memorabilia using Blockchain technology.

Fantastec have signed up Arsenal, Real Madrid in Spain and Borussia Dortmund in Germany to their ‘blockchain-powered solution SWAP offers fans the chance to get digital collectibles like autographs or player cards’.

These clubs are looking to generate greater fan engagement, as well as making money from additional merchandising, and using Fantastec’s SWAP platform are able to reach out to fans world-wide that are unable to attend matches. If Digital cards perform like their paper based ones, they could turn out to be a canny investment, as in the US the index of the top 500 baseball cards has beaten the S&P 500 since 2008 by two fold!

Last year Arsenal became thefirst Premier League football club to sponsor a firm that did an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) called Cash Bet, who raised $38 million for this California based firm, established in 2012.One wonders how long will it be before we see a major football team launch their own Digital currency as a way to further” lock in” and monetise their fans. Given the recent dominance of English football teams in the Champions league and the UEFA cup, where all four teams are English, and the dominance of UK as a fintech hub, it could be that a football team from England are the first to issue a Digital currency…….

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