FC Barcelona Launch Blockchain Passport 'Barca Pass'

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FC Barcelona's Barca Pass Launch 🔑

FC Barcelona have launched Barca Pass, marking one of the most significant blockchain infrastructure deployments by a major sports team to date.

Barca Pass:

• Is the Official FC Barcelona Digital Passport for Barcelona fans

• Allows fans to collect and store digital Barca memorabilia to showcase fandom

• Fans can secure their Barca Pass by logging in via their FC Barcelona single sign-on (Barca ID)

• Built using Futurepass by Futureverse

It is described as the club's "first and only official digital wallet” and is being pitched as a foundational layer of Barcelona’s digital strategy.

In terms of the scale here, FC Barcelona claim to have 230m global fans, with over 11 million of them signed up to Barca ID.

All of those 11 million Barca ID users will be able to access the platform from day one, which I think will make it one of, if not the single largest, blockchain implementation in sports history, should FC Barcelona get a decent opt-in number.

Barca Pass is to function as a comprehensive digital identity and asset management layer for Barcelona fans, enabling fans to create fully customisable avatars in official team kits, collect and manage exclusive digital memorabilia, and access immersive metaverse experiences.

Digital Fan ID Onchain 🎴

So why are Barcelona doing this?

Let’s start with Barca Media, their digital and media arm, that spun out of FC Barcelona to help alleviate financial difficulties the Spanish football giants had (and still have).

Barca Media is a company made up of the following subsidiaries: 

1. Barca eSports: The club’s eSports division.

2. Barca Vision: The Web3 and metaverse division. This includes all blockchain-related partnerships and also virtual world partnerships such as Roblox.

3. Barca Studios: The development studio which creates and licenses audio/video entertainment (other than broadcast).

Barca Media tried to SPAC via Nasdaq for a mooted $1bn in the summer of 2023, but those plans were shelved in summer 2024.

This was a hammer blow for FC Barcelona, who were already embroiled in a difficult financial situation.

In the summer of 2023, Barca Vision, the Web3 and Metaverse division of FC Barcelona sold a 29.5% stake for $132m to LIBERO football finance, valuing it alone at $450m.

The previous summer, in 2022, Barca Vision had raised €200 million from Socios and Orpheus Media for a combined stake of 49%. Half of the $132m raised in Summer 2023 was used to partially buy out Socios and Orpheus, so their stake in the holding company Barca Media was watered down. It turns out that both of these businesses failed to make specific payments to Barca Vision, which is likely the true reason new capital was required.

At the time of this happening, I wrote, “This is not a win for Web3, but a win for financial engineering in football.”

I still wholeheartedly believe that.

But I do find my stance softening on the outlook of Barca Media as a concept, and that is in part due to Barca Pass being launched.

I’ll explain why soon.

Before that, let’s talk about Spotify, one of FC Barcelona’s biggest partners.

FC Barcelona and Spotify entered into a significant sponsorship agreement in March 2022, valued at approximately €280 million over three years. This deal encompassed shirt sponsorship for both the men's and women's teams, training kit branding, and the renaming of the club's iconic stadium to "Spotify Camp Nou”.

There was a huge issue, however.

FC Barcelona claimed to Spotify that they have 350 million fans.

To Spotify’s surprise, after due diligence, reports indicated that fewer than 1% of these fans were registered in the club's database, equating to approximately 3 million individuals whose personal information—such as names and email addresses—was accessible to the club

This sparked further reports that Spotify went back to the negotiating table with Barcelona to reduce their sponsorship costs.

So here we have a football club that:

1. are playing financial checkers with SPACs, financiers and crypto companies to stay afloat

2. have already lost real revenue because they do not know who their fans are

With Barca ID, FC Barcelona have 11 million signed-up accounts since launching in partnership with Rakuten in 2018.

And now, their unified Barca ID SSO has a blockchain component, with Barca Pass.

I think it could be significant, especially considering the context of FC Barcelona’s financial difficulties and the fact that they have already lost revenue from their deal with Spotify because they did not know enough about their fans.

Analysis & Concluding Thoughts 🧠

If you’re losing money because you don’t know your fans, how do you a) know them better and b) know more of them.

You need to 1) have a better understanding of their digital fan journey and 2) meet them where they already are… which happens to be other digital silos across the internet.

This is an incredibly hard problem to solve.

But here is where blockchain can help:

• It can connect disparate silos

• It can give fans control of their data

• It’s by default compliant with data regulations

As Sandy Khaund, CEO of Credenza, put it in his Sporting Crypto Article titled ‘Blockchain 3.0’

“The problems with data in most systems. It’s often inconsistent, inaccessible, and inflexible.

A lot of care is taken to try to attribute data to the correct user, often using an email address as the common ID, even though that skirts the line regarding customer privacy.

A blockchain identity is a seemingly random set of hexadecimal characters that contains no personally identifiable information, and can also be paired with a unique password (managed by a blockchain wallet) that can authorize not only a confirmation of identity, but also subsequent actions and access that should be controlled by the customer. The business gets greater data fidelity, while the customer can provide consistent credentials that don’t expose data that isn’t important (like your email address). 

Of course, most systems pack the data away in a special vault, whether it’s a database, a CRM system, a data warehouse, or the dozens of other options that are intended to protect the data while enabling tremendous analytics, which will only improve with the proliferation of AI.”

To take advantage of this fully, Khaund goes on to say, “In that spirit, we focused on embedding our technology into established systems and services — without requiring a complete overhaul” — when referencing the work Credenza have carried out with the St. Louis Blues and their Bluenatics community.

To that end, I bring you the Fan ID iceberg.

I’ve been trying hard to articulate why some blockchain-enabled data plays in sports work, and why some are just another siloed attempt at fan engagement that will never make it past a small beta group of users.

At the tip of the iceberg is the easiest, most non-obtrusive way of engaging sports fans using blockchain.

‘Connect Wallet’.

Connect Wallet is the equivalent of ‘Log in’ to crypto folk.

Instead of logging in with email and password, Barca ID or Google—crypto users log in using their self-sovereign wallets.

Self-sovereignty is important. We have this in the physical world, so why not the digital world?

The thing is — it will not be the norm for the 8 billion people on the planet. There will have to be a level of abstraction, which is already in the works via a plethora of infrastructure providers.

Below you can see the eSports team, Team Heretics, who have allowed their fans to connect their wallet to their merchandise site, after logging in via email.

This is full of friction and is not intuitive:

1. Make an account

2. Connect your wallet after making an account

3. The wallet only works on one chain (Chiliz)

4. Only benefits fan Heretics token owners

This is quite simply the tip of the iceberg.

It’s not quite ‘lipstick on a pig’ — but it’s very surface level.

Beneath the water and further down the iceberg lies ample opportunity, however.

And I think Barca Media and Futureverse have gone far enough down the iceberg, which makes this extremely exciting.

At first, I thought Barca Pass was perhaps ‘stuck on’ to Barca ID, and was just another siloed dataset. But it’s not. It is ingrained in the Barca Media tech stack, and all 11 million Barca ID accounts will have the opt-in option via T&Cs from day 1, when Barca Pass is live.

That’s pretty incredible.

Suddenly, there could be up to 11 million FC Barcelona fans onchain, benefitting from the technology in a non-speculative way.

After that, we can ask the questions “What’s next?” and “What’s possible?”.

It’s not asking fans to ‘Connect Wallet’ when the likelihood is they don’t have one.

It’s telling them they can now, without changing their behaviour, have a better digital experience that just so happens to utilise blockchain.

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