“Our tickets, our data and the seats in the stadium are some examples of the assets than can potentially be brought on chain,” says Pär Helgosson, Head of Web3 for Paris Saint-Germain, during a panel with Chiliz CEO Alexandre Dreyfus and Blaise Matuidi, PSG legend and tech investor.
Earlier this month the blockchain community gathered around the Main Stage of the Paris Blockchain Week as Chiliz CEO Alexandre Dreyfus and Par Helgosson, Head of Web3 for Paris Saint Germain, took the floor alongside PSG legend and tech investor Blaise Matuidi to share more insights into the recently announced partnership between both organizations.
This move will see PSG act as a validator node for the Chiliz Chain and reinvest the means and funds generated into the PSG Fan Token supply, building a self-sustainable Fan Token digital economy and engagement with its web3 fanbase. This innovative approach has generated huge excitement across the industry due to its potential to shift the paradigm in the way the sports industry embraces and applies web3.
PSG is no stranger to blockchain and its possibilities. The club, a pioneer in the space, has been leveraging this technology to effectively engage with its hundreds of millions of fans across the world since 2019, when they became the first sporting club to partner with Socios.com to launch its official Fan Token.
As Pär Helgosson explained, “Fan Tokens are a great way to engage fans globally on mass and to reach everyone, where you have hundreds of millions of fans outside of the stadium.”
However, as Helgosson pointed out during the panel, “being first is part of PSG’s DNA”, and in order to continue leading the way in the innovation game, the Club is taking another step further by exploring “tokenizing” some of their key marketing assets.
“Our tickets, our data, and the seats in the stadium are some examples of the assets that can be brought on chain,” Helgosson, said. “The tech is here, the innovation is here, and we’ve got the partners. Now it’s about taking decisions,” he added.
Chiliz, the sports blockchain, will be one of those partners playing a strategic role in bringing PSG’s web3 vision to life, as Chiliz CEO Alexandre Dreyfus explained: “This is our focus. We don’t want to be the biggest chain, we don’t want to change the world, we are the sports blockchain, and focus on sports and entertainment.”
The panel, moderated by Alexis Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO of Light Node Ventures, also touched on the different nature and use cases of Fan Tokens (fungible) and NFTs (non-fungible), the two digital asset classes most widely adopted in the sports industry.
According to Alexandre Dreyfus, whilst NFTs gained huge popularity during the previous bull market, Fan Tokens are much better suited for fan engagement. “NFTs don’t work in the context of fan engagement. Fungible tokens, such as Fan Tokens are more relative for today’s world,” Dreyfus said.
Whether it’s through Fan Tokens, NFTs or other digital assets and dapps, PSG legend Blaise Matuidi is sure that web3 technology is going to have a huge and positive impact in the way athletes and teams engage with their fans. That’s why the world champion with France in 2018, now a successful tech entrepreneur leading his own investment fund, Origins, has a wide range of blockchain projects in his portfolio.
“We work with a lot of web3 companies, because the relationship between athletes and fans is something that we really value and is at the heart of everything we do,” Matuidi said.
