The Perfect Match: Web3, Sports Multi-Generational Audiences
The sports industry is looking to capitalize on the buzz being generated by Web3 trends in an effort to optimize fan engagement and invent newer and more immersive experiences, especially when it comes to Millenials and Gen Z audiences.
While older sports fans remain incredibly passionate about their favorite teams and devote a huge part of their lives to following them, recent studies suggest that the same cannot be said about younger generations. For example, a recent study by Morning Consult showed that millennials and Gen Zers are far less likely to sit and watch a three-hour live sports event than their older counterparts.
Major sports clubs do not want to play Russian Roulette with their fan base. Moreover, media companies that have invested millions of dollars to secure coverage rights of the biggest events are becoming increasingly aware that future generations are unlikely to want to sit and watch three hours of sports coverage that’s peppered with ad breaks in the same way their fathers do.
What Millennials and Gen Z want is a more active way to follow their favorite sports teams than the passive methods of the past. Today, the primary way for younger fans to engage with their favorite teams is through social media platforms and memes. They’re much less interested in the older, long-form style consumption of sports content, preferring a more social and snackable experience.
That’s precisely where Web3 comes in with the gamification of sports entertainment, adding elements around wagering, play to earn, non-fungible tokens, digital collectibles, augmented and virtual reality experiences and fan leaderboards.
Sports Embraces The Metaverse
The sporting world is paying attention to this trend, and one of the biggest organizations of all is leading by example. To coincide with the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, FIFA recently announced a brand new metaverse experience for fans within Upland. There, they can head off to a virtual airport located nearby, “fly” to Doha in Qatar, and then visit a digital replica of the Lusail Stadium and FIFA’s World Cup village.
The moment they’ve arrived, metaverse-inclined fans will be able to purchase a range of digital merchandise to express support for their favorite teams, including flags and scarves that can be used to decorate virtual houses on the metaverse land they acquire.
Upland isn’t alone in offering a digital-only World Cup experience. Roblox, the virtual gaming platform that’s popular with hundreds of millions of teenagers across the globe, has also created a technicolor virtual world where younger fans can show their support while playing against their friends.
Upland co-founder and co-CEO Dirk Lueth told Bloomberg that younger generations are moving on from social networks to play games in 3D environments. “Organizations like FIFA have realized that if we want to attract those audiences, we have to be in that space as well,” he said.
The Upland metaverse is unique in that it’s mapped to the real world, incorporating elements of both a digital reality and the flesh and blood of real life. It costs time and money to fly across Upland’s metaverse, though it’s considerably cheaper than in the real world with a flight to Qatar setting fans back around $5 a time. Within Upland, players can buy and sell the virtual counterparts of real life buildings, including a digital replica of the Lusail Stadium that will be awarded to one lucky fan as a prize. Smaller prizes will consist of NFTs linked to video clips of goals and other key moments of games played during the tournament,
FIFA’s experiment is just one of a growing number of Web3 experiences on offer to sports fans. Football fans, for example, can purchase video-based NFTs from Sorare, while the Socios app has created the concept of fan tokens. With this, supporters can buy cryptocurrency tokens linked to their favorite clubs, such as Juventus and Lazio in Italy, and Santos in Brazil. Those fan tokens are more than just a digital collectible, as they enable fans to enter competitions and win prizes such as an online “meet and greet” with players from the team. In addition, holding tokens also provides fans with voting rights, so they can vote on what the team’s new kit should look like and other issues.
Stretching the concept of Fan Tokens further is Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. At the start of the World Cup it launched its Binance Football Fever 2022 Challenge, offering fans the chance to win up to $1,000 in daily cash prizes for successfully predicting the results of the games. Binance Football Fever is a promotional campaign that sees players awarded Gold Pride of Nations NFTs for each game they correctly predict, with prizes on offer that include the chance to meet the players of clubs like Lazio, FC Porto and Santos.
To generate interest in Binance Football Fever, Binance France recently held the first Binance Trophy football tournament in Paris, where it invited 100 guests including various famous crypto content creators and community members to participate. Those guests formed eight teams to compete with one another to land the first-ever Binance Trophy, while promoting the entire experience through their respective social media channels.
In the longer-term, Binance is providing more utility for its Fan Tokens by partnering with TopGoal to create a new football-focused metaverse that will power new experiences and increase the connection between fans and their clubs.
“We want to give real fans virtual matchday experiences, virtual SocialFi experiences, virtual leagues and tournaments, and make them feel part of the club, at the same time maximizing the interests of the Fan Token clubs,” TopGoal explained.
Within TopGoal’s metaverse, fans can participate in its TopManager game to win lucrative prizes that include customized football team jerseys and sneakers and virtual trips to some of the world’s most famous stadiums.
Of course, football isn’t the only sport that is embracing the opportunities provided by Web3 to give fans a more immersive experience. Warner Bros.’ Discovery Sports recently announced that it will leverage Web3 technologies to offer cycling fans a new “metaverse experience” during the London leg of the UCI Track Champions League, which took place in early December.
The event saw WBDS deliver “full, immersive broadcast experience in the metaverse” where fans were able to interact directly with riders through private sessions and podcasts.. The UCI Track Champions League metaverse also offered unique access to profiles of the riders, as well as documentary series and archive footage from previous events. There were additional live feeds too, including individual rider’s cameras, a referee-cam and more. The entire experience was complementary to WBDS’s linear TV broadcast of the event.
A New Era Of Fan Experiences
Cryptocurrency and blockchain might still be controversial new technologies in the eyes of many. However, the latest trends show that when they’re combined with virtual reality and NFTs, they provide an exciting opportunity for the sports industry to create meaningful new experiences for fans.
Web3 technology is evolving fast and its adoption is growing rapidly too. As it becomes more popular, it promises to unlock many exciting possibilities for increased engagement with fans. So much so that the day when NFT tickets, fan tokens and virtual meets and greets are an essential part of the fan experience might arrive sooner than we think.
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