Barcelona Is the Richest Football Club, Will It Turn to Tokenization?

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Teuta Franjkovic
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For the first time, FC Barcelona came in the top leading place of the world’s most money-spinning football clubs regarding the annual league table. This also marked the transaction of power in London and the north-west.

The Spanish champions saw their revenue grow to €840.8 million (£741.1 million) last year. This represents a record figure for any team and it is almost 10 % more than a domestic competitor Real Madrid has.

Manchester United said its income was €711.5 million (£627.1 million) in 2018-19 but analysts from Deloitte say that United may soon find themselves under direct threat from Manchester City and Liverpool.

Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain complete the Football Money League top five, with City, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea the other English teams in the top 10.

Dan Jones, partner in the Sports Business Group at Deloitte, said:

“Barca is a clear example of a club adapting to changing market conditions, reducing the reliance on broadcast revenue and focusing on growing revenues within its control.”

Deloitte expects Barcelona to stay in the first place during the next year as well and state the Catalan club is on course to reach its focus to be the first to generate revenue of over one billion euros in years to come.

Izzy Wray of Deloitte’s Sports Business Group said that bringing operations in-house was probably the biggest impact on Barcelona’s commercial revenue, that grew by 19% to €383.5 million.

Wray said:

“Other clubs will see those big numbers and may look to do an analysis of their own commercial structures to see whether it would make sense to bring operations in-house as well.”

Juventus – First Ever to Be Tokenized

On the tenth place of the biggest revenue making clubs is Juventus with £405.2 million. What is interesting is the fact that recently this Italian club announced the launch of the world’s first Fan Token Offering (FTO). Its main goal is to facilitate related activities carried out by this Italian football club. Using the Juventus Fan Tokens ($JUV), supporters of the football club will now be able to vote on some specific decisions made by the club, and also earn rewards while doing so.

As announced, this year Socios.com plans to kick off a new marketplace offering, that will support social interaction and allow fans to chat among themselves, as well as give the opportunity for fans to directly exchange tokens.

The platform has also announced that by the end of the first quarter of 2020, it will have held FTOs for about six more clubs, including France-based Paris Saint-Germain and Spain’s Atlético Madrid. While both of those will take place in January, February will see FTOs for Galatasaray, A.S. Roma and West Ham United.

Will Barcelona, Real or Manchester Utd. join? We can only wait and see.

Dinwiddie Tokenizes Himself

And of course, it isn’t only soccer teams that are into tokenization and/or blockchain. Brooklyn Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie disregarded an NBA threat to ban him from the professional basketball league, and launched his unique bond on January 13 with the aid of security token platform Securitize.

Dinwiddie pledged “significant dividends for investors” because the plan is for him to sign a higher-paying contract. He explained that perhaps removing this clause and offering a flat bond instead could enable the further processing of this plan to proceed. Accredited investors could purchase tokens for a minimum $150,000 buy-in, giving him his contract’s value upfront.

Author: Teuta Franjkovic

Experienced creative professional focusing on financial and political analysis, editing daily newspapers and news sites, economical and political journalism, consulting, PR and Marketing. Teuta’s passion is to create new opportunities and bring people together.

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