📱 Social Media Madness of the Week
Red Bull Become Contestants on Deal or No Deal!
It’s the semi-final of the Champions League. Lewandowski has just scored for Bayern but Real Madrid are claiming that the stunning overhead kick was offside. Now imagine that, instead of going to VAR, the referee wanders up the bench and offers to rule out the goal and give Bayern a free-kick instead.
The world would go mad right?
Well, now you know what it’s like to be a Formula 1 fan!
At the recent Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Max Verstappen was universally deemed to have broken the rules when gaining a position on Lewis Hamilton. The standard process is to have the race stewards review this footage and hand out punishments.
The standard process it may be, but race director Michael Masi was having none of it! Instead, he decided to get on the radio with Verstappen’s team and offer them a deal if they voluntarily gave up the position to Hamilton before the stewards were involved.
This odd situation led to confusion across social media. This had never happened before and fans were shocked that Masi was able to strike deals with teams without going to the race stewards, with some likening the whole process to an episode of ‘Deal or No Deal!’
🤪 Weird Deal of the Week
Group of Friends Want to Buy NBA Team!
Every friend group has that moment when they decide to buy a sports team. Usually, you are all pretty drunk and have collectively decided that your team’s current billionaire owners are lacking that ‘business acumen’ that you all have in such abundance.
As the alcohol wears off and you start to remember that you spent most of your net worth on a kebab, the dream begins its slow and inevitable death.
But not this group of friends!
‘Krause House’ is a group of basketball fans that have created a ‘decentralized autonomous organization’ with the intention of purchasing an NBA team.
So, what is a DAO? it’s basically an online group that is formed with a common purpose, like crowdfunding to purchase a team. Anyone can join by purchasing tokens and the group has rules which are held and enforced with an underlying code that runs on the blockchain. In theory, this removes human error and allows people to safely invest in a fund knowing exactly what will happen when the funding goal is reached.
Krause house has already raised $1.7 million in Ethereum, but will probably need around $1-2 billion to have any real chance of owning an NBA team.
On its site, Krause House argues that “Team ownership shouldn’t be limited to a handful of billionaires, but rather a movement of individuals that want to be a part of the greatest professional league in the world.”
🗞 Story of the Week
Adidas Enter Deal With BAYC and Gmoney!
To misquote Thanos from Avengers Endgame, “The metaverse is inevitable!”
Wait… does that mean that Mark Zuckerburg is the Thanos of our universe…?
Most companies seem to sense the global shift towards a metaverse, with Facebook, Nike, and Disney making large noisy pushes for dominance of the space.
Determined not to be left behind, Adidas has also started embracing the metaverse.
The German Sportwear giant has announced a four-way collaboration with Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pixel Vault’s Punks Comic, and the crypto investor Gmoney.
While Instagram posts from the collaborators suggest virtual merch, we have very few details of what to expect.
This is Adidas’s second big move in this space, with the company recently releasing tokens for selected app users and stating:
“This digital collectible is our way of rewarding you for following your curiosity as we explore this new age of originality together (…) This token proves you were here from the beginning of this journey. Keep it safe — it may come in handy.”
✍️ Deal of the Week
Manchester City Enter the Metaverse
Manchester City have announced a deal with Sony that will see the two brands create a ‘global online fan community where fans can interact with the Club and each other within an online ‘metaverse’ which will be a virtual recreation of the Etihad Stadium.’
Yes, the football team that struggles to fill its real stadium has decided that the best move is to create a virtual stadium… great plan guys…
Unless most Man City fans are in fact too busy to turn up to the stadium because they are five hours deep into a Roblox session, we are not sure how the virtual stadium will have greater attendance than the real Etihad.
All jokes aside (sorry City fans,) the Metaverse is not something that can be ignored and the club will become Sony’s first sports partner in the metaverse space.
If it becomes a success, other clubs may wish they followed they embraced the club’s love of technology.
“At Manchester City, we have a strong pedigree of continuously embracing the latest technologies to enhance our operation” explains Nuria Tarre, Chief Marketing & Fan Experience Officer at City Football Group.