Most liked posts in thread: Crawley Town / WAGMI

There's only one thing for it. Spend big on Crawley NFT's and vote THRELKALD!

 

Why does this remind me of the Edin Rahic era?
https://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/sport/football/its-refreshing-isnt-it-crawley-town-boss-kevin-betsys-take-on-first-fan-decision-3768463

 

They are utterly screwed, if there's a football club left for Crawley fans to support at the end of the Wagmi era then that's probably the best they can hope for. At the moment all of their attention seems to be on how the footballing side is going tits up but the numbers on the business side look scary.

Supposedly Wagmi managed to get an initial £18m or $18m war chest but given the presence of 2 venture capital firms in their ownership group it's likely that a large chunk of that money has been borrowed and will have to be paid back. Figures quoted by Wagmi regardig the purchase was £5m for the club and they paid off £2m of existing debt (although it wasn't clear if it was paid off with cash or new debt) and the club was losing £1m a year at the point of purchase.

The NFT launch sold 10.2k tokens out of 12k and raised £2.9m but not all of that went to CTFC, there was never an announcement of how much made it to Crawley but Wagmi had indicated 50% of the projected proceeds from the 12k tokens would go to cover costs so the net income for the football club was in the range of £1.4m-£1.7m.

The playing budget has been increased from £1.5m to £3m this year so that accounts for all of the NFT revenue. As far as other income streams go, they gave away the shirt sponsorship to get publicity with an NFT squiggle, the proposed stadium sponsorship from a FTSE100 company has not happened and they've seemingly had a Rahic type effect on the existing sponsors so commercial revenues will almost certainly be reduced.

Attendances are up 25% from last year but prices were dropped by 30% so that hasn't increased revenue. They were one of the many clubs who had replica kit supply issues and Adidas were one of the named creditors that needed paying from the NFT drop so who knows if they've made any money from kit sales (NB the only item of replica kit currently available from the club shop are kids shorts).

With all that in mind it's difficult to imagine that the £1m pa deficit has not gone up let alone been reduced and on top of that they've hired loads of new coaching and analytics staff, a CEO/DOF, rented houses for players, improved catering for players, rented new training facilities, pre season tour, set up a B team and sacked a load of managers.

Then there's all the NFT holders, the 10.2k NFT sales were to 5.6k individuals. Of those 10k NFTs, over 10% had been resold within 3 days of the launch so that's 10% who were purely interested in speculation rather than the project of owning a football club. They recently had their "merch drop" which is when the NFT holders could cash in the original NFT and get the limited edition Adidas kit and their own unique collectible NFT. Now, bearing in mind that this was the big thing and the primary selling point for the NFTs, 1.6k of token holders did not bother to follow through, effectively choosing to write off their investment rather than continue to support the project (this also means that there are probably 2.6k unwanted Wagmi Adidas kits sitting in a warehouse somewhere). Of the 4,000 or so people remaining, nearly 450 have either sold or listed their collectible NFT's in the 3 days since the swap which suggests that you're looking at a maximum of 3,600 NFT still engaged in some way. However, the discord server has fallen from around 50k members with 5k always online to 20k members with 1.7k online (NB online does not necessarily mean active) and the most recent NFT vote that was initiated only attracted 374 votes which all suggests that the engagement with the online community has drastically reduced and it will be a challenge to get them to buy in again for a 2nd season in 6 months time.

Add to all that Crawley stuff what has happened in the wider crypto market and then on top of that, even in comparison to crypto currencies, the NFT market has been totally obliterated. Just to put it in some context, if we are hugely positive and assume that the crypto and NFT market does not get any worse in 2023 than it currently is and continues at it's current December 2022 level, the projection would be the total global annual sales of new NFTs will be £168m so Wagmi are looking at needing to account for 1.78% of all new NFT sales in 2023 which seems highly unlikely given the state of the football club and the fact that at no point has the value of the existing NFTs ever exceeded the original purchase price.

 

They're not really marketing it to Crawley fans, they're aiming for their NFT community so it's all about NFT, Wagmi, the "chromie squiggle" and a Ltd edition Adidas shirt. Even so, having kept an eye on their Discord and Twitter it does seem that they don't have universal buy in from that community and the launch has been put back 2 days "because it has gone so well" (their reason) which is a logic that baffles me and the general consensus seems to be that it's going to be a big ask to shift that many at that price.