Coming together of two worlds — Football and Blockchain

Sridhar R
Sridhar R
Nov 7 · 4 min read

The world of football is entering a new and exciting phase. A lot of football enthusiasts may be wondering whether it’s related to the next football world cup in Qatar or about the Club world cup that is going to take place. But very few football fans will be able to guess this right and I guess very few will even believe what it is about. Its Chiliz, a new token that is about the revolutionize the world of football and other sporting events.

What is Chiliz?

Chiliz is an ERC 20 token, powering Socios platform that gives sports and e-sports fans the ability to crowd-manage their favorite teams, games, leagues and events. They anticipate that by 2020, the global domination in sports and e-sports will be decided by those teams and clubs that effectively activate and monetize their fan base. They call it radical fan engagement

They aim to enhance the say of the fans of teams across the world, across various leagues by giving fans voting rights to guide some of their favorite teams’ management and strategy decisions. Fans can become influencers of any competitive entity. Teams, leagues and events from any corner of the sports & e-sports world can monetize the fan demand for these voting rights.

What is it doing?

Chiliz is one of those interesting cases that is bringing two passionate worlds together, namely, Blockchain and Football. In the blockchain world, a lot of questions are related to use case of these new technologies that are being developed. Chiliz offers an interesting take on one of the pressing problems in the sporting world about fan participation. Across the globe, there have been voices raised against the power of money increasing vis-a-vis ardent fans. But very few constructive solutions have come about to maintain a holistic balance between both. The Chiliz fueled blockchain solution turns team management into an entertainment proposition in its own right, gamifying voting rights into a trading experience. What Chiliz promises is exciting, but one has to wait for things to unfold.

Team Chiliz

Chiliz team is led by successful serial entrepreneur Alexandre Dreyfus. The Chiliz team has a good mix of tech and people from sporting world. They also boast of a rich pool of advisors clearly demonstrating the awareness about the length and breadth of the field that they are trying to capture. They certainly have the pedigree to make it happen. They already boast of partnerships with Football clubs like Juventus, PSG, Athletico Madrid, West Ham, A S Roma and Galatasaray. The recent spurt in the Chiliz token price can be attributed to the announcement of Fan Token Offering whereby football fans can have a say in their favorite club’s decision making.

Value Creation

The Socios platform will act like a marketplace wherein fans can trade their voting rights. The platform will gain revenue from all the peer to peer transactions made by fans through a micro fee. Voting and decision making transactions of fans will be exempted from this fee. All teams, leagues & event entities who come onboard the Socios will get a percentage of micro-fee revenue generated as socios users buy and sell those respective partner’s fan tokens. When fan tokens are released onto the socios platform, a majority of this initial monetary influx goes directly to the partners. For clubs and sporting entities, they get a chance to monetize their fans who are not watching their team play inside their stadium.

Chiliz has ensured that the fans’ expectation are tempered with respect to their say in the decision making process. They have been careful to ensure that fans do not go overboard with possibilities of decision making. They have given few examples of the kind of decision that the fans will influence. Some of them are, deciding the third jersey of a football team, having a say on the squad for a friendly football match, etc. The role of experts in a footballing hierarchy has been largely left to them and involvement of fans will be at the periphery to begin with.

The Future

Chiliz can be acquired from various exchanges like Binance, Kucoin and Bitmex. The recent buzz created around Chiliz due to the announcement of Fan tokens has led to increased volatility. The performance of the token will depend on the utility the fans feel for the use of Chiliz token and further the use of fan voting rights. Chiliz has an impressive list of launches in the next few months. They have an impressive team, advisors and partners to make this endeavour a reality. In the long run, the performance of Chiliz will depend on the meaningful increase in the role of fans in the decision making of clubs on the socio platform. The footballing world will be a lot better from a fan’s perspective if Chiliz becomes a success and if that happens, we will have a magnum opus use case of for Blockchain.

The Blockchain Frontier

Deep dive and insights into blockchain, crypto and decentralized technologies.

Sridhar R

Written by

Sridhar R

The Blockchain Frontier

Deep dive and insights into blockchain, crypto and decentralized technologies.

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