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Liverpool executive explains stance on NFTs and potential for 'metaverse' future

 

Back in March Liverpool made the somewhat controversial decision to enter the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The LFC Heroes Club collection of collectible digital artwork was launched via famous London auction house Sotheby's, the five-day sale seeing a percentage of the financial gain heading towards the LFC Foundation, Liverpool's charitable arm of the football club.

 

The sale did not deliver the kind of numbers that were hoped for, with £1.125m in revenue arriving, with 95 per cent of the available NFTs going unsold. Out of the 171,072 that were available to purchase, just 9,721 were sold - 5.7 per cent of the full drop.

 

 

Liverpool CEO Billy Hogan intimated during the summer that the club hadn't necessarily closed the door on a return to the NFT space, which has tumbled dramatically from the boom that it had enjoyed during 2021 and early 2022, where a number of professional leagues, teams and athletes had moved to create their own NFTs in order to find a way into a new revenue stream that had presented itself during a period when, due to the pandemic and other effects such as potential new legislation around gambling sponsorships in football, some traditional revenue streams had been squeezed or closed off entirely.

 

Liverpool's senior vice-president of digital marketing, media and technology, Drew Crisp, speaking at the Leaders Week sports conference at Twickenham Stadium on Thursday, admitted that the launch had been something of a learning curve but didn't rule out NFTs fitting into the Liverpool business in some form moving forward.

 

Crisp said: "We have a responsibility to our fans to enter these worlds. We know how important sport is, we know what it can do for mental health, physical health and communities. For us as a club, one billion fans worldwide, we want to give them an experience and this technology and this world enables us to give them an experience and take the authenticity of football to wherever they are in the world. That's absolutely something we should be leading on and something we shouldn't be shy about.

 

"Why did we try LFC Heroes? We could have sat on the sidelines and just commented on what everyone else said about NFTs or just saw what others did, but we wanted to know what it took to create them, to sell them, to market them, to understand who buys them, and you can't do that unless you're in it. You have to be on the pitch in order to play the game and we had to be in the NFT world in order to understand it.

 

"We learned a lot from it. We got some things wrong, we got some things right. We've got an audience that we didn't have before and a sense of where NFTs might play in our eco system and that they're not things to be scared of. It was a really good test and learn for us and the good thing is that outside of the Legends games that we run for our LFC Foundation it is the biggest earner for the Foundation that we've ever done."

 

The club created two categories of digital collectibles - a set of 24 unique ‘Legendary’ 1 of 1 NFTs, and a series of generative ‘Hero Edition’ NFTs that combine multiple player illustrations to produce a unique digital collectible for each fan. The ’Legendary’ and ‘Hero Edition’ digital collectibles were made available to purchase during a three-day sale from Wednesday, March 30 to Friday, April 1. Within the sale window, the ‘Legendary’ 1 of 1 NFTs, which consisted of 24 legendary heroes, were made available to purchase through a live auction.

 

The 'Legendary' auction saw an auction of 24 items raise $744,750 (£567,760). The biggest sellers at the auction were Mohamed Salah's NFT at $88,200 (£67,227), Jurgen Klopp's at $81,900 (£62,425) and Trent Alexander-Arnold's at $69,300 (£52,821). Of the total raised, minus costs, the Foundation were in line to receive 50 per cent of the total. A total of £281,375 has been raised for LFC Foundation from overall sales so far, money which will go towards its work in the community, including their education and employability programmes, inclusion and special educational needs and disability support.

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