Football and Cryptocurrencies

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