When Blockchain Meets Sport: Major Challenges Are Addressed
Sports is a billion-dollar industry, but like any other industry it has areas that needs improvement. For example, being in fierce competition for medals and trophies, key players may get injured and miss the whole season. Other challenges sports managers and tournament owners may face include poor fan engagement and broadcasting rights tracking, not to speak of doping scandals that are becoming more and more common.
Luckily, blockchain that is so popular these days can give a helpful hand in overcoming these barriers. Read on to find the details about the application of this tech in sports.
Challenge #1: Injuries from Excessive Exercise
Professional sports swarms with injuries, the cost of which tends to be very high. To better tackle this problem, there’s a need to refine training plans. Some teams have already started taking baby steps in this direction—by applying IoT and predictive analytics. Blockchain is touted to significantly support these efforts.
To analyze athletes’ strengths and weaknesses, coaches could use predictive analytics software that would leverage a blockchain-fed repository of valuable data—namely athletes’ physical conditions, real-time performance metrics, and historical information. That would allow coaches and managers to significantly improve decision-making when choosing who is to play in a particular match, and who is to continue recovering.
Challenge #2: Doping scandals
The world of sports has recently seen a slew of doping scandals. To wit, Russia’s track and field team was excluded from the 2016 Rio Olympics due to their doping conspiracy. And Maria Sharapova who tested positive on meldonium and then cleared continues catching sidelong glances.
The problem is that the current anti-doping system is vulnerable to hacking attacks. But blockchain might be a solution. A foundation for creating a more extensive and secure network to store doping test results, this tech could definitely make sports much fairer.
What’s the procedure? Athletes’ data is put into the system and then checked for compliance with relevant protocols. And after this information has been logged into blockchain, it can’t be altered. That also means no way for sports federations to manipulate data.
Challenge #3: Broadcasting Rights Tracking
Big sports events, whether it’s the Olympics, the UEFA Champions League, or Wimbledon, entice huge viewing audiences. So it stands to reason that sport event broadcasting is all the rage.
And while viewing habits are altering, the sport broadcasting market is getting divided: some spectators prefer social streaming, others favor traditional TV.
To control this diverse broadcasting market, rights holders could use a blockchain network. This would help them track the rights they have already licensed, find unexploited rights, and define those used illicitly. Such a blockchain-enabled network could also enable automatic payments through smart contracts.
Challenge #4: Fan Engagement
Sports fans—one of the most important revenue opportunities for club and tournament owners—always expect to relish an outstanding user experience. One avenue toward giving them what they want is to introduce engaging loyalty programs.
And blockchain might become a foundation for some of them. For instance, sport teams and tournament managers could create their own virtual currency that fans would use to buy tickets, beverages and food, subscription services, or do online shopping—at the same time getting a slew of bonuses.
Moreover, blockchain could be used to enable peer-to-peer ticket exchange. By implementing such a solution, clubs would be able to engage fans and contribute to creating a more transparent ticket market, free of fake ticket sales.
Ready for a Kick-off?
Although blockchain is still in its infancy, it has great potential to tackle a number of challenges the sports industry is experiencing right now. These are athletes’ injuries, doping test data manipulation and leaks, broadcasting rights management, and fan engagement.
One way to build a blockchain-enabled solution for that is to use genEOS, a decentralized ecosystem for designing blockchain applications. And as it’s not easy from the technical point of view, you may need help from experienced blockchain experts with long-standing experience in developing decentralized apps. Just don’t be afraid of exceeding your budget—a new blockchain solution will bring you real business value.