What will the PSG cryptocurrency be used for?

698 Views

PSG will have taken its time, but its cryptocurrency is finally here. As revealed by L’Équipe at the time, the capital club announced in September 2018 the signing of a partnership with socios.com, a platform specializing in virtual currencies. A year and a half later, Parisian supporters can now acquire “tokens”, including digital tokens, relays Le Figaro . In this way, they can weigh in the decisions of their favorite team, just to become “more than a fan”, as the club points out to promote this 2.0 initiative.

This is the second football club to have its virtual currency, after Juventus Turin, which launched it last December. But before then behemoths like Real Madrid, FC Barcelona or Manchester United, which are among the richest teams on the planet, all sports combined. In total, 20 million “$PSG” (pronounced “PSG dollar”) will be sold at two euros each on socios.com. It will also be possible to acquire them on specialized exchanges, for the people most comfortable with cryptocurrencies.

But, by the way, what is blockchain, exactly?

Participate in the life of the club

Fans will be able to resell them and speculate on them, since the price of this virtual currency will fluctuate. They can hold as many tokens as they want: the more they have, the more their opinion will be taken into account in the club’s decisions. Indeed, this is the interest of the “$PSG”: to participate in the life of the club, which will solicit these fans of a new kind via multiple choice questions regularly, for which they will be able to vote. It will not be a question here of deciding which player to buy, if Neymar should start, or if Kylian Mbappé should be sold in a few months. “We are far from the model of FC Barcelona or Real Madrid, where the socios have real power of governance by electing the president of the club. The decisions taken are, for the moment in any case, anecdotal”,Figaro Jérémie Bastien, lecturer at the University of Reims and specialist in sports economics.

The newspaper cites the possibility of deciding the message that will be inscribed inside the captain’s armband or the appearance of the team bus. In 2018, Capital said fans could be asked to give their opinion on where the club’s next tour will take place, or even what their future shirt will look like. The magazine specified that people with a lot of tokens could be rewarded for their attachment to the club by meetings with players or invitations to matches. PSG prefers to talk about “unique rewards, exclusive merchandise and exceptional experiences”, which will also depend on seniority.

Revenue generated: PSG in the top 5

Two million euros per season

The football club should pocket two million euros per season thanks to this initiative. A drop of water in a budget estimated at 637 million euros for the 2019-2020 season by L’Équipe . to sell This is not at all the challenge of this operation, “explains Alexandre Dreyfus, CEO of socios.com, in the columns of Figaro . The goal here is to provide another experience for fans by encouraging them to engage more with their favorite club.

“We have seen it with bitcoin in particular, there can be a strong enthusiasm around cryptocurrency. This can work with a young and foreign audience, particularly in Asia , and constitute an interesting lever for growth. It remains to be seen how the club will use this data to get to know its fans better and offer them suitable products,” says Jérémie Bastien. Other clubs could imitate PSG and Juventus, since socios.com is also associated with AS Roma, Galatasaray ( Turkey ) or West Ham ( England ). It remains to be seen whether the public will respond: only 5,000 people had acquired Juventus Turin “tokens” a month after the launch of this virtual currency.