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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

Hello and welcome back!Some bad news, I’ve got Covid and feel pretty rough. So if this particular newsletter is shorter or of poorer quality, you know it’s because my brain is very foggy! I’m hoping I can shake it off over the next couple of days. For those of you who are reading your first ever Sporting Crypto, I’m sorry, I can confidently say they’re usually better.

I thought about skipping today’s but I felt a bit lost & useless as I’d already cancelled everything else in my day.

Brain fog aside, it feels good to be writing, even if it’s in bed.

🚨🔌 Today’s Sporting Crypto is brought to you by FlipFam! 🔌🚨Before we get into things, this edition of Sporting Crypto is brought to you by the FlipFam app! Users play prediction games in Tinder-like swiping fashion where the best performers win NFTs! It's free to play and you can win some pretty cool NFTs by some awesome designers. 

For sports brands, this presents an opportunity to engage fans in a non-financialised way. There's no need to buy NFTs or a token and there's nothing to trade unless winners of these NFTs want to try and sell them on a secondary market. This is a lightweight way to introduce your audience to web3. They're launching soon and are run by a great group of people. Check them out in the link below! Hopefully, they are the first in a new wave of sports crypto projects that actually try and engage fans in a novel and new way.

Check FlipFam out here!

This week’s deep dive…NFTU: THE OFFICIAL COLLEGIATE NFT EXPERIENCE

Recur, who design & develop on-chain branded experiences for fans to buy, collect, and re-sell NFTs, have launched NFTU - the official collegiate NFT experience. 

Currently, NFTU is doing something similar to NBA topshots in creating highlights that fans can own, but this time, for college sports.

Pro sports are pretty simple to get NFT partnerships in place; the NFT partner simply needs to do a deal with the league and the players association, and they have all the IP & player rights to create NFTs.

In American collegiate sports, it’s a lot more complicated. There are over a dozen major players, plus a long list of individual colleges, each that needs to participate together.

Recur have partnered up with Learfield to bolster their efforts. Learfield is a large collegiate sports marketing company, representing more than 200 of the nation's top collegiate properties.

Safe to say, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill NFT PR stunt. Learfield is a serious player in the collegiate sports world.

Recur, who raised a $50m Series A in September 2021, had this to say about their partnership with Learfield:

In last week’s Sporting Crypto I asked the question “Is there product-market fit for Athlete NFTs?”

I concluded that right now, there’s not.

For collegiate athletes, that might be different, though.And for collegiate culture in general, there definitely is.

Duke University recently sold over 1000 NFTs to commemorate Coach K’s (most famous collegiate basketball coach out there) final college basketball game.

Culturally, the US have embraced Crypto & NFTs in a healthier way than their European counterparts. But within collegiate sports, I feel that it has even more cultural alignment.

The Coach K NFT above is only one example, and the complex licensing deals mean it’ll take a while for more of these propositions to pop up, but it feels like the cult like following collegiate sports have in the US will mean NFT projects may work even better in this niche.

The perfect storm

Recur & their partnership with Learfield look primed to create a lot of value in this specific sporting realm. For those not familiar, in July 2021 student-athletes in the US were given the green light to start earning money from selling their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights. That includes something like NFTs leveraging their NIL rights.

Ever since then, there’s been a rush in the US to sponsor student-athletes and leverage their brands.

And it feels strange to say, but the likelihood of an 18 year old college basketball launching an NFT project, or something like it, successfully - is higher than a seasoned pro. Because they are the target market for NFTs. As per last week’s newsletter, John Wall’s NFT project ripped off art from Fortnite. There’s an element of ‘they don’t get it’ that’s partially true here. But more so, younger people get this space. Young people get young people.

Compare this to when the president of FIFA for example says that young people want a World Cup in Soccer every two years.

Citing…well, nothing.

You get the idea.

Selling NFTs of young collegiate athletes, to young sports fans who are digitally native and crypto aware, makes sense. Or at least makes a lot more sense than Luke Shaw selling NFTs.

And there’s a sense of nostalgia here that is leveraged as well. There’s something about legacies in college sports that do just have a different feeling to that of pro sports.

Recur will likely not stop at highlights. The deal they’ve done here is pretty big and this is a massive market.

No doubt this is only the beginning, and I’m excited to see where their proposition ends up.

More sports crypto stories & things to put on your radar

• A Topps NFT has sold for almost half a million dollars.

• Very interesting interview with Laporta, President of Barcelona, who says Barcelona want to build their own metaverse and have their own native cryptocurrency.

• Sorare welcome Dinamo Zagreb to their platform

• A short story that only needs two screenshots to be told

Great reads, great tweeting and more general ‘stuff’

• FTX Are making their move into Europe - properly. Expect some more European based sports partnerships from the Crypto exchange.

• Great thread here by Matty

• Too many people think that NFTs are just JPEGs.

• Tai Lopez tried his hand at NFTs - and it went badly. 

• Too much selling, not enough building Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Sporting Crypto newsletter. I’m really happy to see so many people enjoying it and sharing it with their networks. If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends who might be interested - and share it on social :)Share