Turkish football team Fenerbahce has launched a fan token project with digital asset trading platform Paribu. The initiative is focused on long term success as the two organizations signed a 25-year cooperation agreement.
According to a UEFA report in the 2018/2019 season, football clubs that had a large fan base averaged a lower engagement per fan when compared to clubs with less fans. Fenerbahce is part of an exclusive group of European football clubs that has a significantly large following and a high level of engagement per fan. Besides Fenerbahce, only two other Turkish clubs, Liverpool, and Juventus show similar statistics.
Fan tokens provide influence to the club’s fans through participation in polls that fans wouldn’t otherwise have a say in. For a large club with a high level of engagement, there should be fans willing to pay for this influence, which can yield significant income.
Fenerbahce’s President did not deny that the fan token project is first and foremost an effort to generate a new and sustainable source of revenue for the club. The team has been in talks with various fan token offerings for over a year and has considered the economic terms of each offer.
Socios.com was likely a candidate for the project. The platform has six Turkish clubs in its roster and has a project with the Turkish Union of Clubs. It is also the best known fan token service in the sports industry.
Paribu, on the other hand is a Turkish based platform and a reliable name in the crypto assets sector in Turkey. It averages $600 million in daily trading volume and has around 4.5 million users. Since the project’s strategy has a long-term plan, Fenerbahce might have prioritized trust and other factors over popularity.
“As clubs, we tell our fans to get a uniform, get a combination, and enter Youtube. In this respect, it is a two-way relationship,” said Fenerbahce’s President Ali Koç. “This journey we embarked on with Paribu will be the most important fruit of the seeds we plant in the digital field.”
Since the announcement of Fenerbahce’s cooperation with Paribu, traffic on the platform is up sevenfold, and the rate of new members signing up has increased by five times.
The fan tokens will be standard Ethereum ERC20 blockchain tokens. Therefore buyers will be able to trade them on platforms other than Paribu.
Meanwhile, Bitci, another Turkish blockchain platform, launched fan tokens with F1 team McLaren and has an association with Brazil’s national football team. Premier League teams Everton and Arsenal signed fan token deals with Socios.
