Lionel Messi – one of the world’s biggest and most popular soccer players – has signed a $20 million deal to promote the crypto company Socios.com, which establishes fan tokens for sports lovers.
Lionel Messi Is Joining Hands with Socios.com
Messi is now joining a long list of famous and renowned athletes – including LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team and Tom Brady of the NFL’s New England Patriots – to take part in some sort of crypto promotion that sees their salaries fly through the roof. This is greater proof that the lines between the crypto world and the sports world are blurring like crazy, and both are becoming tied together in ways nobody could have anticipated.
Messi moved from Barcelona to Paris Saint-German last August. This saw the footballer from Argentina begin accepting cryptocurrency payments prior to his involvement in the Qatar World Cup, which occurred three months later in November of 2021. While this new deal will not include crypto payments for the player, his face and likeness will be used for promotions, and he’s set to garner quite a bit of money for his role in the crypto firm’s advertising and marketing campaigns over the next three years.
In a statement, Messi commented:
Fans deserve to be recognized for their support. They deserve opportunities to influence the teams they love. Socios.com exists to enhance the fan experience, to enable fans to ‘be more.’ I’m proud to join Socios.com’s mission to create a more connected and rewarding future for fans around the world.
Socios.com has thus far signed deals with more than 130 professional athletes and sports organizations all over the world including PSG, Barca, Juventus, and Manchester City. The purpose of the company is to release fan tokens for associated teams and players. As a result, people who purchase the tokens have small stakes of ownership in the companies and teams the tokens represent, which grant them voting rights and additional privileges.
More and more partnerships such as these are popping up in the sports world, as players now view crypto as a new means of garnering funds and adding to their overall wealth. While some fans have criticized the release of these tokens as superficial, they remain popular amongst most sports viewers and continue to garner further deals.
Sports and Crypto Are Becoming One and the Same
Aside from fan tokens, many players in the past have insisted on either receiving partial crypto payments for their work on the field or have converted their salaries into bitcoin and other types of cryptocurrencies. This trend was arguably started by Russell Okung, a former player for the Carolina Panthers.
In early 2021, Okung shocked the world when he announced that he would be converting roughly half of his $13 million annual football salary into bitcoin, calling it the money of the “future.”
Source: https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/lionel-messi-will-get-a-lot-of-money-to-promote-crypto-firm-socios-com/