Earlier this week, Chiliz and Socios.com teamed up with CoinMarketCap to run a Twitter poll to ascertain whether their audience would be interested in our soon-to-be-released Fan Tokens. While this was aimed at a crypto savvy audience, the results were very encouraging — with 1,700 votes cast, 47% of respondents stated that they would be likely or very likely to buy a Fan Token.
Of course, the cryptosphere is not our only market, and as one respondent stated, we were “asking at a place where the majority of us are geeks and with no sports interest.” But that was actually the point — we wanted a clear indication of the market size within crypto.
With our vision to aid mass adoption by the mainstream, we expect a much higher demand for Fan Tokens from the wider football audience. Indeed, research conducted by Nielsen Sports in 2018 found similar results, where more than half of football fans (55%) worldwide would be interested in buying tokens that gave them the right to vote on decisions at their favourite club; they were also willing to pay on average 10 EUR / 11 USD for the privilege. Bearing in mind that football fans don’t necessarily follow just one club, but on average, follow 4.6 teams all over the world, according to Dugout, the only football company in the world that is owned by 9 of the top football clubs, this means that the average football fan might choose to buy Fan Tokens for four or five clubs, bringing the spend per fan closer to a conservative 40 EUR.
There is no doubt that fan influence will transform fan engagement across the sports industry in the coming years. COPA90, the world’s leading youth football brand, released their latest Modern Fan study this week, which stated that “it won’t be long before fans have the power to dictate player celebrations or decide on substitutions, as new ways to influence and interact directly with the action on the pitch emerge.” Furthermore, according to the same Nielsen research, two thirds of football fans are interested in voting to influence decision-making at their clubs, equating to 46m fans in Brazil, 13m fans in Germany, 16.6m in Italy, 2.4m in Portugal, 13m in Spain and 11.3 in the United Kingdom.
More high-profile teams will be joining Socios.com in the coming weeks, before the app is launched to fans in Q2. Juventus will be the first club to launch their Fan Token Offering around the same time.
