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Buying a sports team has been on the radar of the web3 community for a while, and in April 2022, a web3 group called WAGMI United finally made it happen by buying Crawley Town Football Club (Crawley Town FC).
You may not care much for sports, football, or Crawley Town FC, but this is still an interesting project to keep your eye on. It’s one big experiment in how web3 technologies can enhance the experience of real-life communities.
What is Crawley Town FC?
For background, Crawley Town FC are a small club competing in the English Football League Two, which despite its name, is actually the 4th tier of the English football league system.
Here’s how the system works:
there’s one season each year, in which clubs compete against each other
clubs receive a points depending on the results of each match: 3 for wins, 1 draws, and 0 for losses
at the end of each season, a few of the top performing clubs (by points) are promoted to the next highest league, while a few of the bottom performing clubs are relegated to the next lowest league
Like any other football club, the goal for Crawley Town FC is consistently win as many matches as possible, in order to ideally get promoted, or at the very least, avoid relegation. WAGMI United taking over doesn’t change that, but it does change how they plan to get there.
What is WAGMI United?
WAGMI United is a company founded by Preston Johnson, a former ESPN gambling analyst, and Eben Smith, a former derivatives trader. WAGMI refers to a web3 acronym meaning “we’re all gonna make it”.
Their decision to purchase Crawley Town FC was informed by 2 key factors:
web3 tools are enabling owners and creators to build and engage communities in new ways, and these communities love to rally around exciting ideas and stories
sports fans are extremely passionate, coming together season after season to watch the stories of their favourite clubs/teams unfold
At this intersection of web3 and sports, WAGMI United are on a mission to figure out what happens if you give the global web3 community a football club to support. Can a small local club like Crawley Town FC, grow to find fans all over the world? And what does this mean for the local supporters? Can web3 technologies enhance their fan experience?
Preston Johnson: “A lot of NFT projects are just speculation with no real tangible spine, no real true story. Having a football club to root for every week? That’s a spine that people attach themselves to. If we can bring that to this crypto audience, especially if we’re able to actually achieve promotion and move up the ranks of the English football league, then it’s an even bigger story people all around the world can be part of” (source: NFT Vote Dictates Crawley Town’s New Signing)
What does this mean for Crawley Town FC?
To create the bridge between the world of web3 and Crawley Town FC, WAGMI United are leveraging non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
10,152 WAGMI United NFTs were sold in July/August 2022, allowing WAGMI United to raise ~$5m. Holders of these NFTs have been promised various perks, including exclusive behind-the-scenes experiences, physical merchandise (jersey, scarf, hat) and even the ability to provide input & vote on the future of the club. For example, they (alongside season ticket holders) were able to vote on the type of player that the club should recruit.
Obviously, this project isn’t just about the NFT holders. In a win for local fans, the funding raised from the NFT sale has allowed WAGMI United to reduce ticket prices by over 30% and improve the food/catering experiences. Perhaps more importantly, there have been improvements to facilities/equipment, investment in analytics, and new additions to both the coaching staff and team itself.
Will it work?
Time will tell. On one hand, WAGMI United need to prove themselves to the local fans and overcome the general skepticism and hostility the web3 industry tends to face, e.g. here and here. On the other hand, they’re betting on the web3 community to care about Crawley Town FC, to build their fanbase.
What I’m most interested to see is how well they can amass attention and engagement. WAGMI United have made Crawley Town FC an exciting and fun club to get behind. They’re underdogs, experimenting with new tech, with grand ambitions. There’s power in stories like these. It’s one that’s already brought in the partnership of brands as big as adidas to become their official kit manufacturer, so who knows what’s possible? As adidas likes to say, impossible is nothing.
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