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Intro Notes & Plugs 🔌

I enjoyed writing the first edition of this newsletter and thanks to everyone who read the genesis post. I’ve had a tonne of messages since and about 4 or 5 meetings have gone into my diary as a byproduct of it this week alone. This is really cool because there’s a larger community than I initially thought when it comes to people who are working on Crypto Native Sports projects or are just interested in the intersection. I’ve also had quite a few people in the Sporting world in quite prominent positions reach out, so this is either the top of the Crypto market or these two worlds are going to continue colliding at a rapid pace.

If the format slightly changes from week to week, I apologise. This is new to me and I’m calibrating as I go along. So this edition or the next one is longer or shorter, or I cover fewer or more stories - just bear in mind I’m making it up as I go along. Apologies in advance, in this edition both projects I cover are football/soccer based!

🔌 I made a complete Beginner’s guide to Sorare for those interested in the platform which is up to date for 2021

🔌 Since my last post, I’ve been busy helping the Sploot community on their mission to make the worst best sports NFT project in the world. Stay tuned to see how it pans out

Stories & projects of the week

1) -Goals the most ambitious sporting NFT project so far?-

The StoryI only found out about Goals last week, so forgive my tardiness. But I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows multiple times upon first viewing. I knew this was something I wanted to dive deep into for the newsletter.

Goals pitch themselves as: 

Now for those of you who don’t know what AAA means in the gaming industry, it’s quite vague. It’s gaming equivalent to a ‘blockbuster’ in film or Hollywood terms and is mainly attributed to games with huge development/marketing budgets. The person behind it; Andreas Thorstensson came out with a pretty awesome thread on why he’s building this:

This is a huge deal.

The game is still in early production so the details are scarce, as you can imagine. Andreas, in his thread, says the game will be free to play and will use a play to earn model. I’m fascinated to see how this pans out when it’s out in the wild.

If you don’t know what play to earn is, simply put - you’re playing a game, and your time spent on said game rewards you with in-game tokens or playable & ownable assets. These games create their own economies and reward users for their participation in them. A lot of people are thinking about this as almost a new way of working, but digitally. These economies can scale massively. Axie Infinity (the most prominent Play to Earn game in this space) has already surpassed $2bn in gaming revenue, for example

Looking at their Discord, there also seems to be a lot of community-driven design in terms of the game. The GOALS team are constantly looking to their community to help them build what they hope is something pretty extraordinary. This is going to become the norm in the future in my opinion.

ThoughtsAndreas’ thread is great and provides a lot of depth into the thinking behind the development of this ambitious project.

Very broadly speaking, the play-to-earn space is built upon the following notion:

If you imagine games currently, free to play or pay to play - they tax their entire userbase 100% for playing if they want to enhance their experience by buying in-game items, unlocking new worlds or levels. Users derive nothing from that but enjoyment. That’s basically what we’ve been conditioned to being the norm;

Games = enjoyment, and nothing else. 

But that is slowly changing, and will rapidly change once we see more AAA games. Where the biggest margins are, lie the biggest opportunities to disrupt. The way games are made and consumed is going to change massively in the next 12-36 months.

If you’d asked people in the gaming industry who FIFA and PES’s competitors would be in 3 years, they’d likely tell you that there wouldn’t be any. The issue is that these larger entities don’t move as quickly and are therefore ripe for disruption. And when it comes to where the areas of disruption are here, many people at these entities may have thought it’s a gameplay thing. Or a licensing thing?Or maybe even an aesthetic thing?The truth is, it’s broader than that.It’s about experience and value, through true ownership.

Play to earn gaming models are creating economies where incentives are aligned to help build something best for consumers.

I have absolutely no doubt about that. Even if the Crypto markets fall 90% from here, there are already too many seeds being sewn. There are just so many developers working on big gaming projects ready to launch in 12-18+ months.

On the community-driven side of things, this is becoming the norm when it comes to gaming projects especially. The old world version of building anything isn’t going to cut it.

Old world - build prototypes or alpha versions and have users test them after you’ve done a bunch of market research

New world - build ideas and present to a community before building, and harness the imagination that comes from your very sticky community. Now let’s take all of that and then consider the revenues that FIFA make from not only selling the game but also selling FUT cards (FIFA Ultimate Team). In fact, FIFA made $1.6 Billion in revenue from Ultimate team. That’s quite the sum, and exactly why lots of people are going after the free to play gaming sector with new play-to-earn models.

2) -Footium: Football manager but with NFTs-

The StoryI guess I’m on the bleeding edge with this one?(apologies again that it’s two football-related projects for this week’s newsletter, but I couldn’t help but write about both of these)

Footium is blockchain-based gaming’s answer to Football Manager.Taken from the Footium Discord:

I have spent countless hours playing Football Manager in the past. In my Arsenal career save in 2013, Danny Welbeck scored 70+ goals and was nominated for the Balon D’or and PFA player of the year awards respectively. And I loved every minute of it.Footium’s vision is to allow users to own football clubs in the form of NFTs.

Taken from the horse’s mouth once more:

So to summarise:

• Blockchain-based simulation football management game

• You own the football club, which is a digital asset for you to do with it as you wish

• Your football club is an NFT Factory, with an academy that produces new players that are saleable NFTs

• The in-game token creates a Footium economy. The utility of this token is to improve your club, train your players and hire staff

• At the top of this economy, prize pools are set aside for winners of certain leagues.

ThoughtsMy love of soccer might be blinding me, but I think this is awesome. I think that between now and the AAA games that are released in years to come, simulation-based gaming is going to be at the crux of innovation in this space.

The ability to own and craft your club is really cool. Could I as Pet, be owner and chairman of Brownsville Tigers - and hire a manager and director of football? Real-life people, that manage the clubs and run the day to day operations, who are rewarded in Footium tokens that are convertible to fiat?Could I get my football club sponsored and create on-chain cash flow to develop the stadium and scouting network?

The opportunities here are boundless and I’m sure collaboration with other projects is going to be seen in the future.

I’m very interested to see if something like this, or Footium itself, gives Soccer its Top shot moment much as Sorare has. Will the people buying these clubs being Crypto natives or people that love football management simulation games? I think it’ll be a mixture but for Footium to prove a massive success - the majority must be in the latter camp. That’s where the sticky userbase is who nerd out about the time they had a Danny Welbeck Arsenal Save where he scored 72 goals…It’s fostering that nostalgia and memory that people have when it comes to these games and leveraging that to create a more valuable, community crafted game that rewards its users.Every NFT project is an experiment, but I love the way this one is starting to pan out.

Crypto Deep Dive: Minting sponsorship on a podcast

My expertise is in podcasting from a content standpoint so I’m fascinated by how blockchain-based projects impact the future of media in general.

I’m a bit jealous because I thought of this idea a while back specifically for podcasts, but let’s not dwell on that:

So how does that work?

I think this is a great idea. It’s even more interesting when you think about the ramifications from a revenue standpoint for content creators.Let’s say Pet sells an NFT which grants ownership to a 1-minute ad on my podcast for the end of time. Someone is investing in me and my ability to reach audiences, for as long as the podcast exists. That goes for let’s say £5000.

8 months later, my podcast about football or football crypto projects - or whatever, grows by 5x. The audience has gone from 3000 listeners a month to 15,000. The owner of that ad slot, who has been renting it out or using it themselves decides to sell it. They sell it for £30,000. Fun bit for me, I receive a 10% royalty on that trade - and get another £3000 in my pocket to help grow my show.

This frozen block in time is a way to generate capital for your show, and then create a recurring income if it continues to change hand. You could also make it so any time the block of time is ‘leased’ to a brand for say 1 month, you incur a royalty on that as well - let’s say 2.5%. NFTs are handing power back to creators and allowing them to really revolutionise the way they generate revenue.

So why is this relevant and what can we learn?

What’s exciting to me is that…well this isn’t even that amazing. This is very much surface level when it comes to media & crypto. But I’m even more interested to see how brands do this in the future…

Could a sports franchise sell some courtside advertisement space in the form of an NFT which then generates recurring revenues?The issues I guess become clear when someone you don’t want to have the slot, owns it - but things will come to the fore that mean situations like that can be negated.

This is about creating assets out of things that we’re used to either consuming or not owning 

I think these types of things are going to disrupt advertising, sponsorships and partnerships first - then media second. How these two things evolve through the use of NFTs excites me.

More big stories & things to put on your radar

• Socios becomes Global Fan Engagement Partner of La Liga.After last week’s Sorare announcement, La Liga continues to push into this new frontier. Whether people believe in the Socios model or not is one thing, but La Liga continuing to pursue things in this space shows that they’re more than just dipping their toes in these waters.

• Candy.comMLB based crypto collectables with involvement from Gary Vee. It started with Baseball cards…so I guess they’re not going away just because things are becoming more and more digital!

• Mastercard launches an NFT…in collab with Jose MourinhoI mean, what a headline?!Mastercard is giving away the above NFT to one lucky winner in the form of a sweepstake. Someone with a Mastercard card is going to be randomly selected in the UK to receive this! If you fancy it, you can enter here

• Hedgehog Mainnet is coming

• The First F1 NFTs are here…After drive to survive, F1 has exploded in popularity and it looks like they’re doubling down on their new growth by getting into NFTs…

• Christie’s tweeting about Stephen Curry changing his profile picture to a Bored Ape…this year has just been crazy

• Sorare has launched PSG’s 2021/22 cards…Messi is going to go for a lot of money.

Great reads and great tweeting

• What I’m seeing more and more is that people want to speak to those on the cutting edge. The best way to catapult your career by 10 years is to figure out what your parents have no idea about and become an expert in it.

• I think people assume that there’s luck involved in being in Crypto. The reality is, some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met are in this space.

• Unsure what’s going on here but insert *take my money* GIF

Thanks!

Thanks for reading my first ever Sporting Crypto newsletter! If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends who might be interested - and share it on social :)