Anastasia Myskina: ‘In tennis, players have to be self-sufficient’
Anastasia Myskina, Roland Garros winner and TokenStars advisor, and Pavel Stukolov, CEO at TokenStars, presented TokenStars ACE project at Moscow Tech Meetup on September 6, 2017.
We have put together some key points from their presentation below.
Pavel Stukolov: We`d like to talk to you about using blockchain technology to unite various groups of agents on the market. Our primary task as a sports agency is to bring together fans, players and advertisers — and no sports agency has ever succeeded in that before.
First, I`ll give an overview of the tennis fans audience. Anastasia is going to speak about the problems and challenges that both young and professional tennis players face. At the end we`ll tell you about TokenStars — the first ever sports agency on blockchain, and how we`re utilizing this technology to enhance the interaction of fans, advertisers, and athletes.
Let`s briefly speak about tennis. Many people undervalue tennis audience. While in our country it`s a top one among non-team sports. There are over a billion tennis fans all over the world. I believe that we`re meeting a great challenge with our first project to introduce this audience or the majority of it to the blockchain and cryptocurrency world, and to expand the community.
This is an ever-growing audience, it`s increasing by 5–6% annually. And the audience is highly engaged — there are around 170 million fans of the top-20 players on social media.
Over the past few years there’s been a trend towards changing the image of a sports fan — it`s no longer somebody holding a beer, painting one’s face or body in team colors, or with a tennis ball on their head. Today fans need to feel engaged, they need a part in the game. They want to share their opinions and influence the decisions of the sports community.
We see it clearly in football industry that fans’ opinions can often be a deal breaker for transfers and contracts — and tennis is getting there. We realize that fans are very active, they absorb the new technologies introduced by game developers, online broadcasters, and advertisers. We can increase the audience’s loyalty and engagement though interaction with sports celebrities.
Now I`d like to hand over to Anastasia Myskina to give you the idea of the current state with the players. Let me introduce her once again. She`s a winner of Roland Garros and current Russian Federation Cup team captain.
Anastasia Myskina: We have many young talented athletes and tennis players who need support from media and sponsors. For example, there`s US Open and there`s also US Open Junior Championship — and just yesterday (September 5, 2017 — ed.) our young player won her first round. It`s a great achievement. But, obviously, no one heard about her because we don`t really have any supportive coverage even from online sports media.
But we have hope. We`re thankful to TokenStars agency that reached us, our federation, and we`re now looking forward to our cooperation enabling great opportunities and environment for the future of our athletes.
We`re talking about tennis achievements now. And also commercial contracts that might help their careers — in tennis, players have to be self-sufficient and be able to pay for themselves.
It`s a non-team sport and it`s not like in football or hockey where they`ve got a sponsor that covers everything. From what they earn, tennis players have to spend a lot on trainings, coaches, medical services, PTs.
Tennis is clearly an expensive sport and we need financial support. The transition from junior to professional tennis is a very complex process — first you`re just a young girl or a boy and then suddenly you have to face this huge responsibility.
There are a number of challenges that we face, and we hope that various agencies, including TokenStars, will help us overcome these barriers and let our athletes be the best. It sounds trivial, but that`s what we strive for. In addition to what I was saying before, airfares and tennis academies are always our biggest expenses. And we want our athletes to train in our country, to attract funding to our academies — if it happens, I believe, I won`t be standing here alone.
Pavel Stukolov: And we’ll be helping with that. So we explained that juniors` primary aim is to attract funds, while established players need to attract sponsors and advertisers, because traditional sports agencies represent only the top players. Here we see a vast opportunity for blockchain technology. I`d like to tell you how we use blockchain to connect fans, brands, and tennis stars.
We`re dealing with main challenges of the industry.
- We`re assisting players with financial support and attracting sponsors;
- We`re helping advertisers find the right players and ways to engage with their audience;
- We`re also giving fans a unique opportunity to communicate and interact with celebrities.
These are our outstanding features and we brought them together on a single platform by using blockchain
Comparing to traditional talent agencies, blockchain is global at scale. We`re using a huge scouting network to find the most talented and promising young tennis players. Another valuable and important feature is that we will give our token holders the opportunity to interact with our signed athletes.
How do we find players? Our advisory board is led by Anastasia Myskina and Maya Kurilova — Director of Operations at Octagon, a top global TMA. We`ve already signed 6 professional players who we`re representing now and for whom we are currently looking for advertising deals.
What else can we use Blockchain for? To find promoters and advertisers for our tennis players. We`ve already signed a partnership with JAMI creative agency and expecting our first revenue. How to attract audience? We`re going to do that in collaboration with sports media. We already have an agreement with Tribuna Digital and Sports.ru.
Watch the full presentation in Russian here.
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