Various sectors and industries have successfully identified the applications of Blockchain to augment their offerings and have also started devising its implementation, and this digital ledger technology has also found its usage and applications in Sports industry.
In the last season of Indian Premier League 2020 audience was not allowed in stadiums due to the prevailing pandemic concerns and this concluded in massive shortfall in ticketing revenue. A similar decline in revenue was reported across all major sporting leagues across the world. This would essentially mandate to explore and expand the sporting industry across diverse sections to digitally support organizers with an increased audience engagement.
Blockchain could help to loop certain existing gaps and following are such avenues where we can possibly look out for blockchain integration to augment the overall sporting industry service and experience delivery.
- Nurturing talent
- Event Ticketing
- Fan Engagement
- Data Analytics
- Revenue optimization
- Fantasy Sports
- Doping Management
- Nurturing Promising Sporting Talent:
Finances would be secured through Initial Coin Offerings and tokenization of aspiring players. This would give them a much-needed financial security as every sporting talent is not lucky enough to become a sporting star. In this arrangement the initial investment by the stakeholders would make them eligible for a share from players future earnings.
This provides much-needed push for the overall development of players and assures them to follow their sporting pursuits.
2. Event Ticketing:
With the blockchain backed technology black marketing/ reselling and counterfeiting of tickets can be contained. Verifiable and unique blockchain backed tickets will help erase out all the ticketing issues eventually benefitting event organizers.
3. Fan Engagement:
Franchise and sports clubs can ensure fan engagement with the issuance of their own token/coins with which fans could avail club merchandise, event entry and other premium & exclusive services to further up their fan loyalty. This will eventually support the club/franchise with finances and to build brand market value.
Club tokens can also be issued to players or players can have share from the proceeds of the sale of merchandise.
4. Data Analytics:
Blockchain can be modified into a secured data bank storing information of players stats, health, performances and financials. This system could help identify young talents and could be nurtured from a club or franchise specific requirement.
5. Revenue optimization:
Sports memorabilia industry runs into few billion dollars, now a blockchain based platform to sell sports collectibles and digital collectibles will always have verified and authentic identity of the items. Replacing the practice of physical verification for authenticating, each individual collectible will have an immutable digital record that can be traced to authenticate making it a tradable in open markets.
6. Fantasy Sports:
A decentralized fantasy sports platform could take open up a whole new virtual sporting eco-system were a dedicated token could be leveraged by users to build their own teams with the purchase of players. Based on the performance of team and players trade-offs between users can take place. Users could also release NFT’s of their fantasy team racking in some additional revenue.
7. Doping Management:
Blockchain based platform could be used to store all medical records of players. This would increase accountability of sports federations as data on blockchain platform remains immutable and free from any kind of manipulation creating a mandated level of fairness in sports.
The potential of blockchain in sporting industry is immense, from franchise tokenization to fan engagement and fantasy sport. Industry would require to identify shortcomings to develop dedicated blockchain infrastructure to explore underlying benefits. Sporting leaders needs to adopt innovative mindset for enabling tech driven developments for better experience delivery to audience.
Wow.. such a beautiful and knowledge enhancing article. I will make sure to read all your articles in future. Keep sharing such knowledgeble articles with us.