A small football club in the Gibraltar Premier Division has got much attention as they become world’s first club to introduce the act of paying players with Cryptocurrency starting next season.
The team signed the sponsorship partnership via their owner, Pablo Dana who invests in the cryptocurrency Quantocoin. “Contracts for all players in the team will contain payment agreements in cryptocurrency by next season”, Dana clarifies.
Many people say this seems like an unplanned entry point for cryptocurrency in sports as it starts with a semi-professional club who got certified just in 2013 by UEFA. However, taking a closer look you realized that everything adds up perfectly. Gibraltar’s finance sector tops in fintech and also a leading in the blockchain.
Explicitly, the football club owner Dana said, a related interference with transparency incited the involvement of cryptocurrency to the football team, he continued by saying that, blockchain’s easy nature could lessen corruption that had negatively affected the game. Therefore, this has provided his team with a way of paying foreign players who may go through much stress to create bank accounts there.
Furthermore, he stated that the environment in Gibraltar is flawless, thus, being the initial place for some betting businesses 2 decades ago, even when people viewed the place as awful. What they did was to make an agreement and bring rules against money laundering on a platform created by them. We have the knowledge to do likewise with digital currencies, he added.
Presently, retired and active players are driving in. Players like, Roberto Carlos, Messi, Figo and Owen, sponsor partnerships related to blockchain business. On the other hand, in March this year, Milan’s former owner was unsuccessful in efforts to utilize bitcoin in paying off a €10m part of the loan taking to purchase the club. This disclosed the margins of using cryptocurrency when it involves big trade in football.
Certainly, the football community has realized how smaller clubs are top on the list. A the beginning of the year, the amateur Turkish team, Harunustaspor, who played in the Sakrya First Division Group B, come to be the first team to sign a player utilizing cryptocurrency. They paid about £385 worth of bitcoin, together with plus 4,500 lira for Omer Faruk Kiroglu. Although still on a minute scale, the action assured the possibility of blockchain in football.
