Football Freestylers and Niche Sports Athletes Should Get on Blockchain — here’s why.

We all know that sport makes money.

It seems like our devices are being flooded with content of well-known sports, such as football, baseball, and basketball, generating huge revenues for all involved. However, this comes at a cost to less mainstream sports and their athletes, who often receive little attention. For those who represent these ‘underdog’ sports, it can be much harder to make money, because their income is tiny in comparison to mainstream sports.

The popularity of ‘niche’ sports, such as muay thai, ju jitsu, powerlifting and street football, differ from one country to another, but in general, are seen as “less popular or emerging sports”. Thus, sadly, they neither attract the mainstream attention nor receive anywhere near the same media coverage because they encounter difficulties like having globally fragmented audiences, limited marketing and unfamiliarity with the sport.

This lack of attention also hurts the revenue and growth potential of niche sports and its athletes, as they are often dependent directly on their fan base for revenue. This makes the situation complex, and their chances of growth more limited given the fact that the athlete is forced to practice, compete, engage audiences, and develop their brand all by themselves. By comparison, mainstream sports are more fortunate, due to having big marketing departments and corporate marketing agencies who leverage their established name and popularity to capture targeted audiences at scale and scope.

Though the journey of a niche sport athlete is tough to say the least, their engagement with fan bases are unparalleled. Fans are often devoted to following their favourite athletes, experiencing their small steps of growth and tend to be more willing to invest in their success as they realize it really does make a difference.

What media companies don’t seem to realize is that the sponsorship and advertising support provided for niche sports athletes is significantly cheaper than the support for popular athletes, according to the book “Advertising and Consumer Society: A Critical Introduction”. Moreover, with popular sports occupying a place on the big screens, niche sports have a massive opportunity online, where fanbases can easily be reached and engaged with, such as through fan engagement platforms like EX Sports.

EX Sports is a full circle fan engagement app/platform dedicated to ‘niche’ sports and centred on an NFT Marketplace, Live Streaming, Gaming and E-Commerce:

• Marketplace: offers licensed NFTs from over 30 international sport federations.
• Live Streaming: The live Integrated streaming channel offers NFT holders free access to live and on demand content of over 15,000 hours of content.
• Gaming: The latest addition to the app is the creation of blockchain based Play-to-Win games, where players require the associated sports NFTs to play.
• E-Commerce: Users can redeem tokens for fan experiences, merchandise and other products offered by our partners.

In the case of NFTs, these provide incremental revenue to ‘niche’ sports and athletes, while it opens certain utilities for the fans to financially support and deepen their connection with the athlete whilst also making some revenue for themselves in the process.

An example of how EX Sports supports ‘underdog’ sports is that of Street Football. They have partnered with 2x World Freestyle Football Champion, Sean Garnier, to develop a first of its kind play-to-earn street football mobile game, built on blockchain. The game requires NFTs to play, of which the characters are based on real life talented youth who were scouted around the world, often in poor neighbourhoods. The first Urbanball NFTs will go up for sale on Binance NFT, which is the official NFT marketplace of Binance, the world’s largest centralized crypto exchange. This is an unprecedented development that will amplify street football to some of Binance’s 30million+ monthly users. For each NFT character sold, the corresponding athlete will receive a portion of the revenue, providing additional income that can be lifechanging, whilst assisting in their growth.

Image: Artwork from EX Sports’ Urbanball NFT Drop on Binance NFT

NFTs are unique and non-interchangeable units of data stored on a digital ledger. They can be associated with easily reproducible items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files. In the sports industry, these files are unique to the athlete they are associated with, like historic memorabilia, digital trading cards, artworks of players, graphics, videos and event ticketing.

Any sports federation, amateur or professional, can partner with EX Sports to build revenue streams and engagement for themselves and their athletes. Fans can invest in the form of NFTs and earn as the athlete competes and wins. It is almost like investing in a company, but one that you are a big fan of, and one that you’d want to see succeed. Fans get a piece of the pie and earn money as their athletes win, while being more deeply engaged.

The blockchain-based sports marketplace is a promising platform for all sports enthusiasts from all around the world and it is already increasing in popularity. Investment bank Jefferies says that the value of the broader NFT market is forecast to grow to $75 billion by 2025, from about $14 billion today, with much of the growth driven by the boom in sports NFT products.

There’s never been a better time to invest.