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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

Welcome to another edition of Sporting Crypto! I have an amendment to make. Last week I said that Hot Wheels were launching their first-ever NFT. I was wrong, what I meant to say was it was their first-ever NFT drop on FLOW!

Last week I hosted another Sporting Crypto event with about 35-40 attendees and it was awesome!Hoping to do another in NYC in April, and again in London in roughly mid-Q2.

If you’re interested in coming to any Sporting Crypto events in the future or have feedback about previous ones, please send me an email!

🔌 If you’d like to work together in a consultancy or workshop capacity, please respond to this email!

🔌 If you’d like to partner or sponsor the newsletter, email back at this address or reach out on Twitter or LinkedIn.

🔌 I’m in North America until April, so if you’re this side of the Atlantic and doing something interesting I’d love to connect!

This Week’s Deep Dive: Manchester United Football Club's NFT Drop

Manchester United are arguably the biggest European football brand on the planet.

So when they signed a deal in excess of £20m per year with layer 1 blockchain solution Tezos, eyebrows were raised. Mainly due to the bad reputation Web3 has within football generally.

Tezos are a smart contract blockchain, an alternative to the market leader Ethereum.

The deal with Manchester United was reportedly to sponsor training kits, but it has seemingly gone beyond that. This isn’t unusual when blockchains take up inventory at sports teams. They’re usually the first port of call when said team wants to do anything within the blockchain space, naturally.

And that was the case for Tezos and Manchester United when the British football club decided it was time for their first foray into NFTs.

So what is the concept and why was it so successful?

The club began their NFT journey by creating a Discord community for fans and enthusiasts, a digital fan club of sorts.They then introduced a free mint, first allocating 50,000 ‘key’ NFTs to their early Discord community and contributors before going to the public.

What happened next, was probably a surprise to even the club themselves.

Manchester United ended up having 750,000 NFT claims in total for their free drop. Those are some big numbers by any comparison within the Web3 world, let alone the sporting Web3 world.

The keys had three categories of rarity, each with their own respective perks acting as gateways to exclusive merchandise, drops and private discord channels.

The activity seen during the free NFT claim was otherworldly in Tezos terms.

The Tezos blockchain saw 6 times its usual activity, during the free mint.

The spike in Dec 2022 on the right-hand side was an all-time high for the Tezos blockchain in terms of contract interactions. Bravo to their business development team!

At this point, it seemed as though both Tezos and Manchester United were very happy with how the project had panned out.

Manchester United had an enthusiastic group of fans in a digital community and Tezos had added a lot of activity to their blockchain.

The Next Step

The next phase was a paid drop, with 7,777 ‘Red Devil’ NFTs.

Each of the 7,777 Devils in the collection are unique and fans you can unlock a series of rewards that include:

• Exclusive airdrops: These will be future free collectibles and giveaways, as well as invitations to physical events at the club. 

• Devil surprises: Because each Devil is unique, with its own specific traits, it can connect with the action on the pitch. For example, if your Devil holds a trident and one of our players scores a hattrick, get ready to be rewarded! 

• Access to premium Ask Me Anythings (AMAs) – gain entry to new gated areas of the club’s official Discord server and connect with legends at digital events, only for Devil holders.

• Private competition entries: Win match tickets, entry to a corporate box, a spot at our end-of-season Player of the Year awards. You could even step foot on the Old Trafford pitch (news coming soon…)

The devils were reserved first for those that were early to the project and had minted the free key drop, with the highest rarity holders getting first refusal.

Let’s summarise the Manchester United NFT playbook:

1. Community. Build a digital community of fans that really want to a be a part of your drop.

2. Free NFTs. Start with free NFTs to get your potentially non-crypto native community used to the concept of NFTs.

3. Paid Concept. Introduce a paid concept, but keep it accessible. The £30 charged here by United was nominal.

Thoughts

Although I must admit I’m not a massive fan of the artwork in each NFT drop, I have to applaud the demand generated by the club for both of these drops.

The £30 price tag shows this wasn’t massively commercially driven by United, and the level of resource that has been ploughed into this project and respective drops probably means this is a cost centre looking to engage fans in a more authentic way than most clubs have done thus far.

There was also a clear, coherent plan demonstrated here.

In general, the execution just seemed cleaner and more polished than many football clubs drops we’ve seen in the past, which at their worst seem money grabbing, scammy and scattered in their process.

A balance was also found with this drop.

We saw Liverpool try and sell almost $10m worth of NFTs unsuccessfully, and we’ve seen the likes of PSG try to sell exclusive, expensive NFT tickets for pre-season tours.

Manchester United struck a balance of creating demand from a large community and not mandating any purchase to be part of the ‘club’, by also creating a free version.

It was a freemium model NFT drop by a football club. 

I’ve been advocating free drops for a long time now.

Why? 

Because NFTs have a branding problem in sports, especially in European football.

There is the notion that NFTs (a technology!) are a scam, and a lot of football drops haven’t done much to allay that notion…because they haven’t been good.

I’ve long thought as well, that football clubs will have to invest significant time and resource into NFT drops to do something successfully. That’s the case for every good NFT drop, sport or not.

In this example, Manchester United created something accessible that clearly appealed to their fans. I highly doubt those 750k claims were solely from NFT traders and collectors…

Let’s hope that 2023 continues with more drops like this, and fewer that are just clearly trying to make money from fans. The modern day football fan spends a lot of money on broadcasts, matchdays and merchandise — the last thing they want to do is to buy expensive digital assets. At least, for now.

More sports crypto stories & things to put on your radar

• Miami-Dade county have won the case which allows them to remove FTX’s branding from the Miami Heat arena. 

• Virtualness, a mobile-first platform designed to help creators, brands, and the sports, media and entertainment industry navigate the complex world of web3, announced today that Joyee Biswas will join Virtualness as a founding team member, heading Sports and Media partnerships.

• The Australian Open were incredibly successful with their AO metaverse drop in Jan 2022, and they’re going for round two this year.

• The results are in, apparently! Football and Crypto don’t mix, according to Bloomberg.

Great reads, great tweeting and more general ‘stuff’ that could impact you

• A great article here overviewing the Starbucks Odyssey program, which is now in beta for select customers. 

• Game of Thrones have gone all out for the ‘Worst NFT of all time’ award. Just look at those hands!!!

• PROOF, one of the biggest NFT projects, led by Kevin Rose, have signed United Talent Agency out of Holywood to help their entertainment arm scale. 

Thank you!

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