If you have a terminally online brain such as mine, no meme probably gave more pleasure this year than “All My Apes Gone”, the plaintive cry of some rich dude on Twitter who discovered his “Bored Ape Yacht Club” Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) had been hacked. Nobody loves hipsters really but hipsters with a shit-load of crypto? Just target practice for every Internet comedian worth their salt, my favourite being the riff on the Simpsons’ Planet of the Apes parody musical, ♫ “I’ve lost every ape I see, from chimpan-A to chimpanzee” ♫

But forgive the sudden Frank Lampard-style tone shift. No, the joke gets a lot less funny for football fans watching a vast invasion of crypto trash just wash into their clubs. It’s the latest in the wave of dodgy financialisation of the sport that has already given us the vast reputation-laundering of oligarch club owners and betting companies making hay on addiction misery.

First, though, the good news! Although Brighton and Hove Albion on their website boasted as far back as August 2018 that,”in a unique twist”, their sponsorship by crypto trading platform eToro was “believed to be the first-ever major sponsorship arrangement paid for in cryptocurrency”, our club have been very much in the distant rearguard of the digital trash trend. In fact, among all the English Premier League clubs, it is clear we stand apart.

That some crypto marketeers sponsor football clubs to promote their brands barely scratches the surface of what is wrong with this latest excrescence of Modern Football. What has really caused justified outrage has been the direct marketing schemes of NFT products aimed at fans that hardly any of them understand, cynically using club insignia and famous players to exploit loyalty and naivety.

Heading this particular hall of infamy (why change habits of a lifetime) is John Terry, who launched his “Ape Football Kids Club” NFT back in February at a price of around £540 a pop, only for it to crash in price by 90% a month later and trade even lower than that currently. Boycott The Sun ‘n all that but we have to acknowledge they came up with the killer line of “Jonzi Scheme”.

Even more comically hapless has to be Michael Owen. Now you might think his main achievement this year has been surpassing beloved Albion fanzine pioneer Ian Hart as Love Island’s most famous football-related dad. But before that back in May, he took to Twitter to claim that, “despite the critics, my NFTs will be the first ever that cannot lose their value”.

Cue Owen’s business partner saying “we cannot guarantee and say that”, hasty deletions by Owen and the satirists moving in for the kill. “Trevor Bastard”, the creator of the legendary Twitter spoof of non-league football, Streatham Rovers FC, noted: “Michael Owen has completely rewritten the laws of economics. Yes, you read that right. Michael Owen, former Liverpool and England striker, has devised a commodity that cannot lose value. Betting has already closed on the next Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner.”

Very rich ex-footballers pumping unregulated financial assets is a bad situation but even worse are the football clubs themselves trying to milk their own fans as a revenue stream. When you see the collective solidarity anthem of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” hawking the individualistic ethos of NFTs, it’s hugely jarring. The “LFC Heroes Club Collection” that Liverpool teamed up with Sotheby’s to promote raised £1.1m from their own fans earlier this year. While this was well short of a target of about £8m thanks to Koppite opposition, Liverpool’s CEO recently told local newspaper the Echo that the club would nonetheless continue to explore “future opportunities” in NFTs.

Even more comically hapless has to be Michael Owen. Now you might think his main achievement this year has been surpassing beloved Albion fanzine pioneer Ian Hart as Love Island’s most famous football-related dad. But before that back in May, he took to Twitter to claim that, “despite the critics, my NFTs will be the first ever that cannot lose their value”.

The big name that keeps cropping up in football club-promoted NFTs is Socios, a crypto exchange that markets tokens for as many as six Premier League clubs, including the likes of Arsenal and Leeds. Strangely, one of the first things Arsenal ordered the footballer now known as Benjamin White to do once they handed over the £50m to us a year ago was to make a video promoting the benefits of their own Socios token, asking Gunners fans “what songs do you want to hear when we win?” That very same White video was then banned last December by UK watchdog the Advertising Standards Authority for “trivialising investment in crypto” and taking “advantage of consumers’ inexperience or credulity”, a ban upheld on appeal only a few weeks ago. No one ever put you through all that shit while at the Albion, Ben!

When pressed by critics, Socios will say they don’t market NFTs as investments but, amid all the hype symbolised by Michael Owen’s bragging, it’s classic “read the small print” guff. The final club so far to sign up for the Socios experience was none other than C*****l P****e. This time, fan opposition hit the headlines at their Everton game last December as a banner was unfurled in the Holmesdale End by the “Fanatics” that read: “Morally Bankrupt Parasites: Socios Not Welcome”. So I wanted to put tribal loyalties aside and ask everybody’s favourite St Pauli tribute act via Twitter messaging how their anti-NFT campaign was currently shaping up. Alas the slide into DMs met with my usual levels of success but, thinking about it, telling a Brighton fanzine that C*****l P****e were marketing “a shocking and disgusting proposal” [their words] was probably never going to go down too well on the mean streets of Norwood.

Ok, so you might be thinking by now, isn’t the crypto infestation into football very much yesterday’s problem? After all, the crypto universe famously crashed down to earth in May. Doesn’t everyone know by now to steer clear of a sector awash with hacking, bankruptcies and get-rich-quick hucksters? But there’s the rub, we’ve been here before.

The crypto crash of 2018 was actually worse in percentage terms than 2022’s collapse yet it changed none of the speculative fever around bitcoin and other tokens from then on. If you study the financial press now, there is no great sign that anything will be different this time round either. Crypto boosters shrug their shoulders and say it’s a normal thing for the weaker parts of any asset class to be shaken out as the market corrects healthily.

Chances are you might not have heard of BlackRock but a few weeks ago the world’s biggest controller of financial assets (ten trillion dollars’ worth) sealed a partnership with bitcoin exchange Coinbase. Back in 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called bitcoin “money-laundering”, so it now very much looks like the traditional old money titans of Wall Street are embracing crypto completely unfazed by this year’s crash. So will crypto’s dubious influence on football really ease? I believe if anything it will ratchet up further – unless fans do something about it.

But that’s NOT you in those battle trenches, Dogma reader, certainly not for now. The situation at the Albion remains becalmed as crypto wars rage at our Premier League rivals. It’s a fascinating question why that is, many of us will put it down to the fact that the current ownership arrived on the back of the single greatest upsurge of Albion fan power in our history, so their sensibilities will be closer to fan interests and more sensitive to anything that would cause the level of anger we have seen in the anti-Socios protests.

The investigations writer at The Athletic, Joey D’Urso, has mulled the question and come up with two other theories. The Albion’s very lucrative link with a giant of traditional finance like American Express would make us less likely to want to deal with upstart rival financial groups operating in crypto, he says. That’s certainly plausible, though as we have seen, the walls between traditional finance and the crypto sector are collapsing month by month.

D’Urso’s other argument is more convoluted so I’ll quote it in full: “Brighton are owned by Tony Bloom who, as well as Brentford owner Matthew Benham, made his fortune in sports betting, using sophisticated models to predict the outcome of sporting events and win bets in the big Asian markets. It is understood this has a counter-intuitive impact on sponsorship deals because Brighton tend to steer clear of involvement in activities that could leave them open to criticism.”

Ok, so you might be thinking by now, isn’t the crypto infestation into football very much yesterday’s problem? After all, the crypto universe famously crashed down to earth in May. Doesn’t everyone know by now to steer clear of a sector awash with hacking, bankruptcies and get-rich-quick hucksters? But there’s the rub, we’ve been here before.

D’Urso’s use of the traditional journalistic phrase “it is understood” is noteworthy here as it signals he probably has this line from somebody who knows what they are talking about rather than it just being total guesswork by him. But whatever the accuracy of this analysis, the practical conclusion for fans like us is the salient thing, Albion remain more risk-averse and more reputationally sensitive than other Premier League clubs with regard to crypto. In this instance, a happy outcome.

For the sake of any crypto fans reading this, let’s park our default scepticism of NFTs for a second. After all, it’s easy to see why crypto retains an allure for many people. Boomers of all political persuasions hate it of course but, once you get down to Millennials and Gen Z’ers, the picture starts to get a lot more complicated. While crypto was perfectly designed to appeal to those kind of anti-state libertarians who take a suspicious interest in age of consent laws, it’s obvious that it has successfully appealed to younger generations who politically lean either right or left. It offers an optimism and hope that people have grabbed on to like a life-raft to escape prevailing economic winds. Notice that since the 2008 global financial crisis, Britain hasn’t had a pay rise? What better way for an individual solution to your troubles than a bit of dabbling in crypto investing?

This is where the entire cottage industry of the crypto belief system comes in with its utopian ambitions of (jargon alert) “web3”, which explained simply means democratic control of the Internet economy and, here’s the great galaxy brain conclusion, how about owning and democratically controlling football clubs through the blockchain and NFTs also?

How stupidly far-fetched is that? Except just 20 miles up the road from the Amex, it’s supposedly just happened. Brightonians may look over-sniffily down their nose at the London overspill New Town of Crawley and indeed, why ever bother thinking about their football since they were put in their place for generations with that 5-0 FA Cup thrashing in 1992? But in a twist of fate, Crawley has become the first place in the entire world of football clubs where crypto dudes are promising to apply the principles of (more jargon alert) decentralised autonomous organisations (DOAs) and bring fan power to the unfashionable northern borders of Sussex.

DOAs are the nirvana of the NFT true-believer, the place where libertarian and anarchist visions stage a mash-up to create leaderless democracies of votes based on your ownership of digital tokens. Worried about climate change? How about charging in crypto to use oxygen generated by trees that have been put on the blockchain? This bizarrely droll example cited by Fraser Watt in Jacobin betrays the reality that these are communities created purely on the basis of private riches rather than any collective lived experience, he concludes. But NFT communities are gaining popularity thanks to widespread discontent with the current state of an Internet controlled by the Big Tech giants like Google. The solution apparently isn’t to break up these huge monopolies but to build some kind of Young Thatcherite paradise.

But back to the paradise of Crawley. League Two football strangely makes its one and probably only ever appearance in Jacobin, the house magazine of American socialists, as it tracks the unsuccessful attempt last December by US crypto investment group WAGMI to take over Bradford FC. WAGMI next pitches up in Sussex in April to buy Crawley Town for around £5m, promising to fund a journey up the leagues powered by the sale of NFTs.

The Albion’s very lucrative link with a giant of traditional finance like American Express would make us less likely to want to deal with upstart rival financial groups operating in crypto, he says. That’s certainly plausible, though as we have seen, the walls between traditional finance and the crypto sector are collapsing month by month.

WAGMI says it has learnt from all the bad publicity, no NFTs will be marketed to Crawley fans, their innovation is to market Crawley Town FC to the mushrooming worldwide audience of NFT communities. Sceptics were forced to recognise this wasn’t idle bluster as the first Crawley Town NFT collection in July achieved global sales of 10,000 at around £350 a token, earning the club a cool £3.5m. Those numbers crushed those of the world-famous Liverpool FC brand and are, ballpark, a beefed-up player budget for the entire season at Crawley. Now alongside their traditional fan base of a few thousand, overnight a new kind of Reds fan appeared, around 5,500 of them around the world with their NFT that also offered physical products like a replica shirt, a cap and a scarf.

But WAGMI talked up another value of their NFT, a vote that allowed fans to take decisions at the club in accordance with DOA principles. The first such fan vote weighted 50-50 between season ticket holders and NFT buyers mandated the club to get a midfielder from a choice of the 4 main positional options on the pitch and ex-MK Dons winger Brandon Mason was duly signed. Sky Sports News presenter Emma Paton was impressed, speaking after her interview with WAGMI’s Preston Johnson, she said: “Now and again I get to speak to people that make it clear, the future of football is very bright.”

There’s no denying that WAGMI have delivered some benefits to Crawley’s traditional fan base, a cut in season ticket prices of 30% is nothing to sniff at in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Then there's even seeing loanee Teddy Jenks every week. But the same fans suddenly find themselves outnumbered around 2 to 1 by another type of Crawley supporter they’ve never met and never seen in the stands or the terraces. James William in Dogma Issue 4 describing “Hipsterball” wrote: “It’s a statement for the age of the individual: local, organised and representative has been replaced with transient, polarised and passive.” James wasn’t talking here about NFT fans but the various experiments in alternative fandom such as MyFootballClub’s takeover of Ebbsfleet FC and the middle-class influx at Dulwich Hamlet FC. But his words seem prescient in this latest example of imagined communities potentially displacing real working class-based football ones built up over many decades.

It’s true that English football fans have at times looked enviously at the German model of club ownership and wondered if another future is possible. Whether WAGMI will turn out to be good stewards of Crawley or not remains to be seen (what is the attention span of an American crypto hipster in his 30s?) but it’s hard to see how their vision of fan control is any more realisable than the libertarian utopianism of web3 and DOAs transforming the Internet and marginalising the likes of Google and Facebook. As Jacobin’s Fraser Watts notes, because 0.01% of Bitcoin owners control 27% of Bitcoin, it’s just a recipe for recreating society’s current inequalities. Football won’t be any different. NFTs don’t offer any short-cut alternative to the long-term slog of independent fan organisation and longer-term joy of creating authentic fan cultures for generations ahead.

Stephen Smith / @SteveNickSmith

Artwork by Gullski / @BHAgullski

This article was originally published in Dogma Issue 7, September 2022.

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