Tech

WAGMI United dreaming of domestic promotion following Crawley Town acquisition

04/08/2022
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Following an unsuccessful venture in purchasing English football team Bradford City F.C. in December 2021, WAGMI United — an innovative Web3 brand utilizing blockchain mechanics and the global sporting culture — has announced the acquisition of English fourth-division team Crawley Town Football Club. 

Founded in 1896, the West Sussex club known as the Red Devils endured a turbulent existence both on and off the playing field, or pitch. Triumphs including two league-winning promotions, four standard promotions and seven cup trophies — four being the Sussex Senior Challenge Cup. This provides fans with positive memories, but incidences like the 2006 administration following the transition to fully-professional status balance the fortunes.

The team is currently placed 13th out of 24 in the English Football League Two, also known as the Sky Bet League Two.

For greater context on both Crawley Town and the immense historical significance of English football, Crawley Football Club — as they were known then — was founded prior to some of the current European heavyweights such as Italy’s Juventus F.C. in1897, Spain’s F.C. Barcelona in 1897 and seven-time Champions League winners AC Milan in 1899.

Cointelegraph’s tech writer Tom Farren spoke to Preston Johnson, the co-founder of WAGMI United and new co-chairman of Crawley Town, for a deeper discussion on the motivations and attractions to the club, as well as how they envisage integrating Web3 mechanisms.

Johnson immediately expressed his personal and team‘s collective respect for the club‘s long-standing history and roots within the community.

Enquiring as to how they envision the process of unifying the existing predominately-physical football community of Crawley Town with the global technological ecosystem of Web3, Johnson revealed that “it’s our priority to make sure that you have the best team possible and, when you go to the stadium in person, you have the best experience possible.”

He continued on to say that to achieve such goals, “we do need to also bring in a bunch of new fans from all around the world and get them invested as well, and that’s what we’ll be doing with NFTs and the Web3 component.”

“Ultimately, we want all of our fans — from new and existing fans to local and remote fans — to have a voice in how the club is run and feel it represents them and their community.”

WAGMI United is an avant-garde investment organization in the United States founded by Preston Johnson and Eben Smith, two renowned figures within the nonfungible token (NFT) landscape. Johnson is known as the co-creator of “Pixel Vault” and “PunksComics” — the latter of which has traded 23,600 Ether (ETH) on OpenSea — and Smith as the founder of Digital Collectibles Agency.

Their overarching ambition is to transform the successes of Crawley Town with a fusion of the cultural dynamics of social media and nascent technologies within the Web3 sphere such as digital fan tokens, NFTs and blockchain transparency, with traditional business operations witnessed throughout the sporting industry.

To support the footballing endeavor, a number of successful entrepreneurs including VaynerX chairman Gary Vaynerchuk will take on advisery roles within WAGMI United to help support the execution of technological initiatives.

After donating an initial 10,000 Great British pounds to the Crawley Town Community Foundation, the organization announced its inaugural NFT collection in partnership with Pixel Vault to be launched on May 7.

Speaking with high expectations for the upcoming NFT partnership with WAGMI United, founder of Pixel Vault Sean Gearin stated that “I believe we can come together as a community and utilize the powerful force that is Web3 to help create a positive change in the sports landscape.”

The newly-appointed founders have issued a bold pledge to orchestrate a fan vote to decide on their future role within the club if they do not achieve the blueprinted success of “earning promotion to League One by the end of their second season in charge.” In their eyes, the probability of promotion during that timeline as we currently stand is 50%.

Upon requesting further clarification for the supposed “mechanisms to hold ourselves accountable” in the originating press release with their aspirations of second-season promotion into League One, Johnson wasn’t yet willing to divulge WAGMI’s intentions regarding potential decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) adoption. He did, however, exclusively reveal that “current season ticket holders will for sure” be granted priority access to any voting mechanism implemented.