For young athletes, branding themselves online has become imperative to drive their success as up-and-coming professional sports stars. Personal branding helps them convince current and future prominent sponsors and brands that they can be a beneficial fit for their organization. It supports them in creating sufficient public goodwill to begin and sustain their philanthropic initiatives while also propelling their professional career.
NFT, Blockchain, and Smart Contracts for Young and Emerging Athletes
However, challenges in the form of various complex rules and regulations, sports contracts, archaic and centralized sponsorship processes, and branding strategies make it difficult for them to establish themselves in the sports space. Consequently, young athletes capable of emerging as eminent stars fail to obtain sufficient money, sponsors, and brands for personal branding. They fail to get enough support from brands and fans to utilize their NIL (name, image, and likeness) for profit.
Professional athletes and celebrities lend their appearance, talent, or voice to brands and sponsors for gaining profit. But now, emerging athletes have their turn to do so with technologies like NFT (non-fungible tokens), blockchain, and smart contracts. NFT on blockchain is not limited to sports collectibles, trading cards, and digital tokenized assets. These technologies provide them a legal opportunity to make effective use of their contracts, including NIL, for generating profit before struggling to earn a regular salary or money as professional athletes.
Utilizing Sports Contracts and NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) Rights for Personal Branding with NFTs
Generally, it is difficult for athletes to obtain sponsorship from different brands and sponsors due to various limitations. For instance, a brand’s contract terms may limit them from endorsing another brand during the contract period. Also, brands and sponsors remain reluctant to sign up-and-coming athletes due to authenticity challenges. Additionally, fans fail to find authentic ways to support their favorite young athletes in becoming future stars.
NFT contracts on blockchain in such scenarios emerge as a potential concept for exploring trademark guardianship in the era of name, image, and likeness. They provide young athletes with the opportunity to utilize tokenized fractions of sports contracts, including their assets, name, image, and likeness globally securely and efficiently.
NFT can connect investors, brands, and sponsors with them in the most secure, efficient, and innovative way. Fractionalized NFT contracts render it possible for them to obtain more than one brand or sponsor for branding and sponsorship. Also, it provides brands and sponsors a way to validate the authenticity of these NFT contracts. With fractionalized NFT contracts on a blockchain, fans can also get a piece of their favorite athletes. They can play a significant role in financially supporting their future sports stars while ensuring a sustainable investment opportunity for themselves too.
In a nutshell, for all involved stakeholders, NFTs use case as smart sports contracts revolutionizes:
- The transfer of players from one club or team to another
- Information gathering of performance statistics for authentic sponsorship
- Validation of social and professional presence for branding contracts
- Investment in fractional ownership of athletes’ sports career by fans to support them in professional career-making
- The lending of athletes’ name, image, and likeness as tokenized assets for reproduction by fans, sponsors, and brands, for-profit
How Football Agencies Benefit from Fractionalized NFT-based Smart Sports Contracts
In April 2015, FIFA prohibited clubs and players from contracting third-party investors for economic rights agreements. However, an NFT contract does not infringe on this regulation. Essentially, companies like blocsport.one divide one comprehensive NFT sports contract into hundreds of pieces and connect investors globally with those pieces. Thus, any sports agency willing to digitize its contracts can do so while adhering to the regulation.
Blockchain for Ensuring Security and Transparency
It is blockchain, the underlying technology, that powers the security and efficiency of NFT-based sports contracts. Its distributed ledger ensures immutable yet transparent recording and storage of each transaction and information.
Visit blocsport.one to know everything about how agencies can digitize their contracts and how young, up-and-coming athletes can enter the NFT marketplace and make use of their marketing and NIL rights.
