Since I started writing Sporting Crypto, I have probably had over 30 conversations with people who want to buy sports teams, and tokenize the equity.

The Green Bay Packers for example have over 500,000 shareholders. Manchester United and Juventus are publicly traded. Germany still runs a 50+1 ownership model. Barcelona, Real Madrid and others have ‘Socios’ who vote on club presidents.

These are all varying degrees of ‘ownership’.

Blockchain, is the master of capital coordination.

And the tokenisation of real world assets has exploded.

So why hasn’t it happened to sports teams yet? And will it ever?

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Crypto is in its real world era.

2017-2020 was the era of tokens.

2020 was the era and beginnings of DeFi.

2021 were NFTs.

But after the collapse of FTX in late 2022, crypto was desperate for the nurturing, guiding hand of an adult.

The space went back to basics.

“Let’s put dollars on a blockchain”

And since August 2023, the supply of stablecoins has doubled from $150bn to $300bn.

And this isn’t just for trading crypto tokens, which is why stablecoins first started getting popular.

Payroll, collateral, 24/7 money movement and B2B usecases have all exploded in the past 24 months.

Crypto’s first real product market fit moment beyond a store of value was here.

And if dollars can be tokenised, then why can’t everything else?

US Treasury debt, commodities, stocks, private equity and real estate — the things that drive the world economy are starting to become tokenised. The total value of non-dollar tokenisation is now over $30bn, up from $10bn at the start of 2025.

It’s a trend that is accelerating, not slowing down.

So what about sports?

The new asset class.

Goldman Sachs, Wharton Business School, Apollo and others are telling you sports is now an asset class.

But why now?

Because humans are always, historically, driven to scarcity.

And within the context of AI accelerating abundance, simple supply and demand would dictate that things cannot be replicated. Things cannot be generated. The things that are culturally significant and embedded in the human species will become more valuable.

Indeed, NFTs were ahead of their time in trying to detach physical ownership from scarce digital assets.

But in retrospect, we needed that bridge. Where there is still something earthbound and tangible that backs a digital asset.

A microcosm of this phenomena is happening in trading cards, particularly Pokemon cards.

TCG weekly revenue on tokenised collectibles marketplaces Courtyard, Collector Crypto, Emporium and Phygitals have exploded, up to $7.5m per week, a 200% YoY increase from this time last year (May 2025).

The NFT has become the digital receipt, rather than the grail or the artwork. Although I can imagine that years from now, they will be all encompassing.

But back to scarcity.

Packy McCormick, one of the inspirations for me starting a newsletter, wrote ‘Scarce Assets - The abundance-driven scarcity supercycle’— and it’s excellent.

This chart showed that ALL of the F1 teams combined are worth a little more than half of what Cursor, the AI coding platform, is worth.

Which is bananas.

Indeed, in 2010, there was not a sports franchise on the planet worth $2bn.

Now, the top 100 are ALL worth $2bn+, worth half a trillion combined.

Before we discuss the potential market size, let’s discuss why you would want to tokenise the equity in a team.

Indeed, tokenising equities means that they can trade 24/7.

But sports teams are mostly private, so why would you want to tokenise them?

Instinctively, most people would answer: capital.

Sports teams always need capital.

But, equally, team owners are not short of being able to find that capital.

There is always an institutional buyer these days.

And team owners do not have 100,000 people on their cap table.

Therefore, unless there’s desperation, they do not need to sell equity to retail.

Having a digital certificate of ownership tied to your digital and physical experience of a team, however, could be a gateway into globalised loyalty solutions as we have never seen. With the chance that your stake increases in value. Crucially, that stake is scarce, and you have an emotional attachment to it. And let’s be serious, it’s about status too.

The question beckons whether you need the ownership piece to achieve some of these goals. To create a digital experience that maximises revenue.

After all, sports is a primitive business.

Arsenal Football Club make as much money annually as Klarna (~$1bn in revenue).

The unlock to achieve much higher valuations is tied to scarcity in an era of accelerated abundance, but also untapped potential.

It’s just not clear whether tokenising the equity is core, or supplementary to, doing exactly that.

If we presume that 20% of owners want to tokenise the equity in their teams, then the market is worth $100bn. If 25% of those 20% actually end up doing so, you end up with a market size of $5bn.

Now, of course, that market size, if looking at the valuation of sports teams, will continue to grow. But it’s quite small. Real-world assets tokenised are already at $30 billion.

One of the reasons we haven’t seen this happen yet is that the market is still small.

A $5bn TAM where you are required to 1) convince team ownership this is a good idea and 2) then sell equity to fans… is a difficult market to operate in.

It’s not that I don’t think this will happen, or that it will happen well.

But the reason it hasn’t happened to me is clear.

The TAM is too small to have massive resources allocated to it, which is what it requires to get it right.

Whether the equity is tokenised or not, the hard things are still hard.

Convincing team owners.

Dealing with retail stakeholders who might kick up a fuss if things don’t go their way.

Indeed, in 2024, Republic sold 10% of Watford Football Club via Seedrs, where the equity was digitised in this fashion.

Around £3m of the £17.5m stake was sold to retail. This shows how hard it is to actually drive demand.

Distribution is difficult.

Getting a stake in a team might be easier than actually getting it in front of the people who want to buy in. Especially if it isn’t a top tier IP, like Watford, for example.

So the hard thing about doing this isn’t putting the equity on a blockchain chain.

It is finding the right team.

It is distribution.

It is convincing team owners.

It is hoping against hope that having that many shareholders is not a nightmare.

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