Mr. Alexandre Zodmi, Head of Partnerships Acquisition at the prestigious Juventus Football Club and former Senior Global Sponsorship Sales Manager for Paris Saint-Germain Football club was the eminent speaker for the PILLAI/FIFA/CIES Conference held virtually on Saturday, 7th May 2022.
Mr. Zodmi started the session by talking about the traditional streams of revenue for football clubs in the past. The 4 main revenue streams for a football club (excluding players transfers) were TV Rights, Ticketing & Hospitality (match day), Merchandising and Sponsorships. He spoke about the various challenges it presented as the game started evolving with the help of technology. This trend created new streams of revenue. He spoke about emerging concepts of Fan Tokens and NFT’s and how they were a new way to engage fans and generate money for clubs and also how fan engagement can be monetized by NFT’s. Mr. Zodmi then explained the concept of Blockchain technology. He said it was a system of recording/transmitting information in a way that makes it impossible to change, hack or cheat the system. He spoke about its application in the sectors of food, healthcare, payments, sport & insurance. The next part of the presentation was on CRYPTOCURRENCIES, which is a digital currency produced by a public network, rather than any government, in which transactions are verified and recorded in a decentralized system. Examples: Bitcoin, Ethereum, PSG Fan Token, Barca Fan Token etc. He shared that in September 2021, EL Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as a national currency and how big brands like Starbucks, Microsoft & PayPal are accepting crypto payments. He spoke about how crypto currencies are investing in sports and in football. Most of the top European clubs now have a partnership with crypto exchange platforms. This is a key category, very trendy and with big marketing budgets to spend. The session was interesting and participants asked a lot of questions regarding the future of these new concepts.
