The global sports market has grown over 50% in the last decade, valued at a half trillion dollars. Sports NFT projects have generated over $1 billion in primary sales, and several of the top crypo sports apps are NFT applications. Dapper Labs' NBA Top Shot, which signed multi-year licensing deal with NBA to license iconic in-game moments, still maintains over 37,000 unique buyers each month despite the NFT slowdown. But the market is shifting from speculation to utility. As NFTs lose their luster as speculative investment in crypto assets, there is an opportunity for NFTs to provide real utility for athletes and fans alike.
This month, I spoke with a high school sports league in Los Angeles, which has produced star players, and they will be making jerseys and hoodies and doing meetups with their future-star players. They showed great interest in minting NFTs, not only to fundraise, but to provide a more fair source of supplementary income than is traditionally offered to students: major sports brands often offer financially-desperate students rapacious terms in exchange for perpetual rights to their name and likeness.
I also spoke with Baron Davis, who is making an NFT collection of digital jerseys and venture studio to help give exposure to other non-NBA athletes such as women's sports through potential partnership with the WNBA. He sees NFTs as having utility not only as collectables, but also as granting access to exclusive merch, to a WINS (women in sports) branded channel and "History of the Game" documentary series about sports lifestyle and culture, and to real-world events. Davis also contemplates NFTs as playable assets in a future metaverse, and also as tickets to a virtual basketball museum dedicated to women legends, where players can nominate and elect each other into a "hall of fame." Both of these projects point the way to the creation of a disruptive sports agency, where deals could be done as simple licensing fees giving players voting rights and participation in offerings, and where they would be able to sell access to digital goods and experiences (which could potentially have investment value) rather than as mere speculative collectibles.