Sports teams find new ways to engage their customers.
For sporting clubs, digital tokens provide new and innovative ways of interacting with their global fan base. The tokens, which are stored and exchanged electronically, are designed to encourage supporters to interact with their clubs via mobile voting and polling.
After a year-long development, in January 2020, Italian football club Juventus’s more than 340 million fans will have the chance to purchase Juventus Official Fan Tokens via a Fan Token Offering (FTO).The offering is believed to be the first tokenization of a football team and will allow fans to exchange tokens with one another.
The proprietary blockchain-based Proof of Authority algorithm has created 20 million Juventus tokens. Once they are all sold, no more will be made available. The price is around two euros per token, depending on the exchange rate at the time of purchase.
A limited number of free tokens will also be made available through the augmented-reality function of the Token Hunt app of Socios.com, a blockchain-based fan-engagement technology provider which is launching the digital token for Juventus and a host of other European football clubs.
“With Socios.com, we believe that we can offer new opportunities to our worldwide fan base to engage in cutting-edge ways with their favorite club,” stated Giorgio Ricci, head of Global Partnerships and Corporate Revenues at Juventus.
Other football clubs expected to launch digital tokens for fans in the new year include Paris Saint-Germain football club, Atletico Madrid, West Ham football club in the UK, Turkey’s Galatasaray and Italy’s As Roma. Saint-Germain football club’s digital token will allow supporters to vote and be awarded prizes and VIP status.
In October 2019, German football club Bayern Munich announced blockchain-based “digital collectibles” for its fans via a partnership with Stryking Entertainment. The Sacramento Kings NBA team also announced in October that it was working with CryptoKaiju to launch “crypto-collectibles,” or toys that are traceable on a public blockchain.
