Football and Cryptocurrencies
The Journal of Alternative Investments, Summer 2023, 26 (1) 23-38 DOI: 10.3905/jai.2023.1.188
Posted: 16 Feb 2022 Last revised: 2 Nov 2022
Date Written: January 31, 2022
Abstract
This paper investigates the emerging segment of the cryptocurrency market related to football fan tokens (FFTs) – digital assets used for engagement with professional football clubs around the world. More specifically, we study investability of the FFTs from the perspective of risk and return. We find that FFTs generate a whopping 150% return on the first-trading-day. This return is significantly larger if FFT market cap is higher, FFT offer price is lower, football team displays better historical performance, and is domiciled in a relatively smaller city with the higher GDP per capita. We also find that in the long-run FFTs severely underperform all major crypto benchmarks including NFT, DeFi, Meme, and Bitcoin. Moreover, the returns to FFTs tend to be highly volatile (160% annualized). Intriguingly, we find that the real-life performance of football teams does not affect contemporaneous market performance of their FFTs.
Keywords: Cryptocurrencies, Football fan tokens, Fan tokens, Blockchain, NFT, DeFi, Bitcoin, Alternative investments, Fintech, Risk and return
JEL Classification: C43, D44, G11, G12, Z11
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation