Sports Tech 3 min read

Football: Melbourne Victory Expanding Into NFT World

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A week after Fremantle Dockers announced their partnership with crypto.com, Melbourne Victory have joined the NFT and Crypto world by partnering with Sanctum-X.

The start-up NFT marketplace will be the club’s official Asian Champions League (ACL) sponsor at tonight’s play-off-match against Vissel Kobe in Japan.

Sanctum-X is an NFT marketplace with a specific focus on building a digital sports community.

The platform will allow users to buy and trade NFTs through its platform and open sea shop, while also creating the opportunity for clubs, sports and digital enthusiasts to mint their own collections and enter the marketplace.

Essentially, the start-up will allow sports teams like Melbourne Victory to create and monetise NFTs.

The partnership, focusing on creating sports and creative assets, will begin later this month with the platform’s first drop due in early April.

Melbourne Victory will be Sanctum-X’s first Australian sports club partner with club’s managing director, Caroline Carnegie, stating it is excited to partner with the platform.

“With a predominant sports focus, it will be exciting to provide our fans and members with a unique opportunity to explore a curated journey into the sport’s metaverse through Sanctum-X,” Carnegie said.

“NFT’s, non-fungible token’s, are becoming more mainstream and their value and popularity is growing at a very fast rate across the world,” she said.

Throughout 2021, the NFT industry saw a 21 000% increase in trades.

The sporting industry has been quick to capitalise upon NFT’s reach and popularity with PwC’s recent ‘Sports Outlook’ report dubbing NFT’s the future of digital assets and a potentially major revenue stream for sport.

The report claimed NFTs will have a big impact in shaping the future of sport and its revenue streams due to their ability to create virtual access tokens, season ticket members (STM) NFTs, and collectible NFTs.

Collectible NFTs in the form of traditional memorabilia, like player trading cards, are increasingly being minted by clubs and bought by fans to generate large digital asset revenues.

To give monetary context to this process, The Premier League is currently shortlisting NFT trading platforms in a deal expected to generate $414 million in returns.

NFTs are also providing value to the sporting industry through STM NFTs which offer season ticket members special edition collectable NFTs for the games they attend.

Finally, the PwC stated virtual access tokens being offered by a variety of sports will be a third large contributor to the sectors increasing revenue stream.

The report concluded by stating NFTs in sport have the theoretical potential to generate a serious revenue stream, however large technological and legal investments are required to make the avenue a practical endeavour.

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