Leading the Tokenization of Professional Sports with Borussia Dortmund
We partnered with BVB to create an exciting sports tokenization experience for fans across the globe.
Today is an exciting day for our company. As our friends at BVB and SPORTFIVE announced today in a joint announcement, we have partnered with Borussia Dortmund, one of the most beloved football (=soccer) clubs in the world.
If you want to know more about what exactly we are building with Dortmund, I recommend you subscribe to our newsletter here or follow our publication on Medium. We will be sharing more information during the course of the upcoming weeks and months.
Meanwhile, I wanted to use the opportunity to tell you more about our current thinking regarding tokenization in professional sport.
Tokenization in sports needs to be all about the fan
We have written extensively about the different tokenization options that professional sports clubs can choose from. One very basic but mission-critical strategic paradigm should be the undercurrent of each: you need to put the fan at the heart of everything you do.
Successful tokenization strategies are not about selling tokens. Instead, you ought to look at tokens merely as a means to an end. They are an innovative socio-economic technology and, as such, open up a fascinating design space for new products, services, operating models, and business models. Good design is about understanding your audience and creating utility. This holds true for tokenization as well. And once you get those right, commercial success will follow naturally.
In the case of professional sports, we see that tokenization can create a lot of value when it comes to gathering, building, and facilitating community. It can enable new forms of fan participation. And it can enable new digital organizational models that are almost tailormade for fan-centric sports organizations. That’s why, at Liquiditeam, we build everything we do with the fan as the focal point.
Each club is different, so your tokenization approach should be, too
The one thing that is sacrosanct in sports is the relationship between fans and their favorite club (or athlete). The entire ecosystem of professional sports is built on the passion, fascination, and emotion that comes with it. When launching our journey into the sports tokenization domain, we realized very quickly: this relationship is the most important asset of any professional sports entity. Hence, we set out to develop a solution that strengthens and enlivens this relationship.
Based on this thinking, we made one specific design decision early on: we are building highly customizable software. Every club has a different fan base. Every club has different needs and means. And every club aims to deliver a unique experience. We understand ourselves as enablers first and foremost. Thus, our tokenization solution is designed to enable strong relationships and digital experiences in a way that fits the needs of a broad spectrum of sports organizations and athletes.
Tokenization powers fan-centric network organizations
All too often, when people talk about “fandom”, they consciously or unconsciously imply a rather one-sided relationship: fans are seen as mostly passive consumers and recipients. But in the case of sports, this is a flawed model. Across the world, you find many different organizational structures, many of which give an active voice to fans. Think, for instance, of the Verein in Germany or the socios in Spain. Sports fans have always looked for ways to participate. And if a club lets them, they are willing to contribute a lot more than only their cheers.
That’s why we think tokenization is a powerful tool. In the light of increasingly distributed fan bases — fans move, games and adjacent content is available globally, etc.— the ways how we organize participation and contributions also need to change. At Liquiditeam, we build the tools for fan-centric network organizations in the digital age.
The vision will come alive soon
When we had our first conversations with the great people of Borussia Dormund and SPORTFIVE, we quickly realized that we shared a common philosophy. So partnering up to shape the future of sports tokenization felt very natural. Over the next few months, we will reveal more details about what we are building. If you want to follow along, subscribe to our newsletter:
About Liquiditeam
At Liquiditeam, we develop token-based financing and fan engagement solutions for professional sports clubs and athletes. If you want to learn more, explore our comprehensive webinars and workshops, subscribe to our newsletter, drop us a line at hello@liquidi.team, or follow us on Twitter.
