The invasion of elite British and European football by cryptocurrency recruiters and hawkers of non-fungible tokens is well underway. Investigative journalists like Martin Calladine have swiftly skewered football’s new partners, from the suspicious to the nefarious, but it’s anything but mainstream football news.
That’s not surprising. The world of cryptocurrency is bone dry – no doubt a specialism for its enthusiasts and evangelists – but your club and mine are in bed with them. Calladine has been looking very closely at the leading name, Socios, for some time.
“Socios’s model, then, is one of charging football fans for a say over the actions of the organisation to which they already pay huge amounts,” he wrote as far back as January 2020, “and of which they consider themselves the true spiritual owners.”
In his tweets since that article, Calladine has repeatedly demonstrated how “fan tokens” aren’t for those spiritual owners, but a cryptocurrency recruitment tool; bring in the fans to prop up the associated currency and the traders will follow to take advantage. Indeed, the extent to which football fluctuations don’t affect their price is alarming.
These partners are, at best, worthy of debate and introspection on the part of the clubs signing with them. That’s when they’re even real. In November 2021, Calladine attempted to look under the bonnet of 3Key, the “newly announced Man City crypto partner which was staffed by people with false identities.” By the time he popped the hood there was nothing underneath it.
City’s suspension of the partnership is scant absolution of their own complicity. We should know by now to expect no better.
The non-fungible token (NFT) phenomenon is more intriguing, at least from an anthropological point of view. NFTs are most simply described as unique digital items that can be bought, owned and traded on a blockchain.
Like any new technology, the long-term stickability of NFTs will be defined by their applications. And, also like any new technology, we’ll have to wait for the pornography industry to figure those applications out for us.
Beyond collectables and vanity ownership, NFTs will be used creatively as digital keys for real-world experiences, for exclusivity in retail, in gaming, and for a whole host of as-yet undefined use cases.
British football’s most infamous example to date is Rangers’ Champions NFT Collection, which offers 1,111 uniquely numbered NFTs of varying scarcity to commemorate the club’s 2020/21 title win. The sheer price of some of the items predictably drew fire.
Scepticism is rife but the tech and marketing worlds are frothing about NFTs. If you’ve forgotten that this is an article about football supporters then you’ve encountered the root issue of crypto and NFTs in the sport. Blockchain, which underpins both, isn’t a hot topic on the terraces.
So, who is all this really for? Has the NFT train simply arrived early, or is it at the wrong platform entirely? Are fan tokens for fans or traders?
Calladine and others have dedicated countless hours to unravelling cryptocurrency in football as top-level clubs – and not just in football – continue to welcome new partnerships and buy into the fan token fallacy.
The detailed work of these observers is a vital pillar of scrutiny that has at its core one simple truth. “Fan engagement” can be exploited because football supporters are fiercely loyal, highly emotional and eager to feel involved in anything and everything their clubs will allow.
Pick at the outer membrane of that truth and there lurks another beneath: fan engagement is bullshit. It’s a myth. A lie. It’s fakery that distracts from the fundamental dearth of genuine supporter representation in professional and semi-professional football.
At the top of the sport, the fan engagement smoke and mirrors are a false global solution to a real local problem. Fan tokens sell a fantasy of belonging and influence without geographical or cultural discrimination. Wherever you are, you can be a part of it. Whether you’re actually a part of it or not.
Fan tokens are just the latest example. Calladine’s previous efforts drove a stake into the heart of OWNAFC, one in a long line of member-ownership models seeking to buy a club and outsource the fun decisions – which players to sign, what formation to use, which team to select, whether or not the manager can put food on his family’s table next week – to fee-paying members.
The assumption has always been that this promise of influence is seductive to football supporters. It’s not. It’s bollocks. It’s never about the club or the fans, but outsiders who become members (if we’re generous enough to ignore that it’s really about the business, without exception). Football supporters who have a lifelong and physical connection to their clubs understand this implicitly and won’t abide it.
Supporters aren’t immune to the temptations enabled by modern technologies, social media chief among them. Many of us like to feel that we know who our players are away from football, or see behind the scenes, or watch goals from training sessions. This is engaging stuff. The analytics prove that.
But most match-going supporters know they have no right to wield direct influence over day-to-day football decisions, and that anyone offering magic tokens or nuggets of power without ownership is nothing more than a digital highwayman.
Ultimately, it’s ownership that really matters and to which active and authentically engaged club supporters are actually entitled. At Premier League level, Liverpool’s Supporters Board might be a solid step in the right direction.
Whether through a tangible shareholding or the more abstract but no less significant notion of “representation” – there is an important distinction between representation and voting rights over ephemera in the name of engagement – ownership tasks supporters with having their say where it counts, where it really means something.
It places in their hands only a modest power, but it’s a start. It gives them responsibility and brings them into discussions about how their clubs are governed at board level and run on the ground, affording them a small but crucial role in protecting the institutions “fan engagement” firms seek to use them to exploit.
Fan engagement is fluff. Supporter representation holds club owners and the sport’s governing bodies to account. That’s one of the reasons why this year’s Fan Led Review of Football Governance, led in actual fact by former sports minister Tracey Crouch MP, is both essential and contentious.
Crouch’s review made two recommendations that highlight the difference between genuine supporter influence and empty, exploitative fan engagement.
Firstly, it backed direct supporter input through a shadow board that would be consulted on key off-pitch decisions. Secondly, Crouch recommended that important heritage items should be protected by way of a golden share for supporters. Note the lack of polls and lols.
The headline recommendation was for the introduction of an independent body to oversee financial regulation and owner/director tests. Additionally, the review recommended measures to improve diversity and inclusion, a new corporate governance code, and a Premier League transfer levy.
It’s little wonder that the Premier League’s big talkers have been talking big as they rail against recommendations that put the game ahead of their short-term hoarding of power and money, but a good percentage of their own supporters feel uneasy about their coordinated response.
After all, when those recommendations are boiled down to their basic rationale, they’re about protecting the clubs we love, even and especially from the people who own them on our behalf.
It’s not a popular thing to talk about and it’s certainly more grey than it is black and white, but there is a distinction between fans and supporters.
Perhaps it’s most diplomatically described as the difference between fans who buy tokens but back the suits at their clubs against the imposition of regulation because they represent the same club, and supporters who see more tangible benefit in golden shares and shadow boards and internal club scrutiny.
For the latter, the message to their clubs couldn’t be clearer with the fan-led review still warm from the printer.
Keep your fan tokens and your crypto partnerships. Keep your Man of the Match votes and token-gated content. We want a say on the things that actually matter because we care about our clubs and the game, not the money you make supposedly in our name.
Don’t engage us. We’ll engage you.
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Chris Nee
@SphinxFtbl