Socios signs up Major League Soccer — but it’s not a token effort yet

Fan token platform Socios has partnered with 26 Major League Soccer (MLS) teams to offer fan engagement experiences and rewards, but so far no fan tokens have been announced.

The biggest pro soccer league in the U.S. made a joint announcement with Socios on Wednesday detailing that the partnership will help fans gain access to “exclusive rewards, polls, and opportunities” for the 26 partnered MLS clubs.

Although the announcement did not mention any specific fan engagement events, it stated that “MLS envisions that fans will be able to have the chance to win prizes for making correct game-related predictions and for correctly answering questions.”

MLS raked in $816 million in total revenue from ticket sales and merchandising in 2019 from 8.6 million fans according to Statista and Wikipedia. Data from 2020 and 2021 is heavily skewed due to Covid restrictions.

Socios has now partnered with over 125 sports teams across eight international sports leagues according to its website. Most partnerships involve the creation of fan tokens that buyers use to participate in events and earn exclusive access to perks.

Fan tokens represent a fairly big business in their own right, with a market cap of about $255 million according to CoinGecko data. The majority of such tokens are from European soccer teams.

Engaging with fans inevitably includes issuing memorabilia, which Socios has issued through nonfungible tokens (NFT) for European soccer teams in conjunction with the Chiliz (CHZ) platform. Socios and Chiliz also signed marketing partnerships with 13 NFL teams to create NFTs.

The news however has not been warmly welcomed by MLS fans on Twitter, with some fans venting their distaste for the partnership. A quick glance on Twitter suggests the majority of tweets from fans across the league have been negative, with many pointing to Socios’s existing partnerships with European soccer leagues.

Blowback from fans may have been fueled by mainstream media coverage of the emerging market. An Apr. 29 article from sports news outlet The Athletic painted the tokens and their marketing tactics essentially as pump and dump schemes designed to raise revenues.

The official Twitter account for Dynamo Theory, the community supporting the Houston Dynamo MLS team, tweeted today “You will never see fans across MLS come together over something like they have [over] this Socios sponsorship.”

Related: Gatorade trademark applications hint at joining the metaverse

When asked to confirm what it meant by the tweet, the admin from the account told Cointelegraph that the tweet is not against the partnership, but said: “Just read the replies and quote tweets on every team’s announcement.” They offered the LA Galaxy’s thread as an example, which has a few unimpressed fans.

All Dutch and English crypto news!

Vitalik Buterin wants rollups to hit stage 1 decentralization by year-end

Ethereum network standards should increase when considering layer-2 scaling solutions, suggested Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. News Own this piece of crypto history Collect this article as NFT Join us...

MicroStrategy is trading at an ‘unjustifiable premium’ to Bitcoin: Analyst

Kerrisdale Capital claims MicroStrategy’ is no longer a “unique way to gain access to Bitcoin” but Michael Saylor has long argued his firm will remain...

Mystery malware targets Call of Duty cheaters, stealing their Bitcoin

Malware database vx-underground has warned of a new info-stealing malware in cyberspace that is targeting video gamers, especially those who use cheating software. News Own this piece...

Prisma Finance $11.6M hacker claims it was a ‘whitehat rescue’

The hacker’s on-chain message came approximately six hours after the hack occurred. However, blockchain security firms noted the hacker had also started swapping the stolen...

Beste exchanges

Koop je crypto bij Bitvavo