Reports have surfaced revealing that top football clubs in Europe have bagged extra millions thanks to fan tokens.

---

Clubs such as Manchester City, Arsenal, Barcelona, and Juventus have reportedly signed up to the socios.com app. It is through this app that they sell and distribute the fan tokens, which fans purchase in exchange for involvement in particular club decisions. Reports indicate that the clubs have earned around $204 million through fan token sales.

However, concerns and criticism have arisen regarding whether or not fans know exactly what they are buying into. Alexandre Dreyfus, founder of socios.com, stated in a tweet, “Innovation requires education, education, education. The most important is being transparent and communicate with parties that don’t understand what we do and where we go in the next few years.”

Messi’s move makes a mark

Earlier this month, football superstar Lionel Messi made a shocking move in ending his tenure of 20 years with Barcelona. He first joined the club as a youth back in 2000. On August 10, the 34 year-old joined the French side Paris Saint-Germain, which is another club signed up with socios.com for fan tokens.

Amid speculation that Messi could join the club, Paris Saint-Germain’s fan token, PSG, saw a considerable spike in value. More specifically, the token began at $21.95 on Thursday August 5 and climbed up over the ensuing four days. Narrowly missing the $45 threshold and achieving a three-month high in doing so. The spike equated to 100% growth.

Data showed PSG’s price rise even further, to around $58 on August 10, the day Messi officially began at the French side. Following this revelation, the fan token’s price shot back down to $48 and has declined steadily ever since. At time of press, PSG was worth $33.88.

Furthermore, a large number of the PSG fan tokens formed part of Messi’s welcome package when he joined Paris Saint-Germain.

Messiverse NFT collection gets underway

While not necessarily directly involved in PSG’s price performance, Messi has had his hand in the crypto space in other ways. Namely, the Messiverse NFT collection, which was made in collaboration with Australian digital creator BossLogic.

The Ethernity Chain platform exclusively hosted the collection, which went on sale on August 21. One of BossLogic’s artworks, entitled The Golden One, had racked up a bid of 56,300 Ethernity Chain (ERN) tokens at time of press. This equated to $1,117,555.

Aside from BossLogic’s digitial depictions of Messi, the series also included a “hidden” NFT, created by London-based artist Impossible Brief.