Takeover Rumours

What is the connection between:

• Tulips
• Darien
• South Sea Bubbles
• Clarance Harty
• Bradford & Bingley

 

They are almost certainly going to want to pay with Crypto itself. Despite its name Cryptocurrency isn't considered a currency and as such disposing of it for FIAT currency incurs capital gains so anything they agree to pay for the club will cost them a fair bit more (Capital gains in the US is 20% I believe)

And the thing is with NFT's even if it's just being used to generate rounds of investment you need some utility to keep people buying them and certainly needs to attract people from outside the business core audience. I'll use an example of Sorare and Funko. Sorare being a NFT based Fantasy Football game gives the NFT's utility, they can keep releasing NFT's and people will keep buying them and the prices rise because they have a purpose. Funko make collectable figure of various things in pop-culture including from Music, Movies, TV, Books, Comics and Sport, many of you may have seen one of their lines Funko Pop's on the shelves of various stores. They got into NFT's in September with their hook being you would buy packs of cards and special cards would come with a redemption for the Pop on the NFT as a free physical item (or if you collected all the cards without a physical redemption you would get a different physical pop). That got a lot of fans of Funko excited as Funko pop's with limited runs of less than 1500 pieces are worth hundreds and in some cases thousands of pounds and the first round of them also had a lot of NFT fans speculating. The problem is not only have they released a new set from a new franchise every month since the first set which was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fell in value sharply on December 1st which is when people could redeem their physical pops because the value was being driven by Funko fans wanting the actual pops and that's tanked the value of all of them. As an example packs are $10 for 5 or 6 cards , I sold a Dupe Legendary card of Shredder which came with a physical redemption for $267 and a Rare card with no redemption for $56 and then the rest of my dupes (about 8) for a combined $88 so more than covered the $60 I spent but the other 26 ones I held onto are right now worth just $22. The latest line they released after the first rounds of redemption is Star Trek and the Legendary card of Kirk with a physical redemption are just $36 and the Scotty and Kilngon ones are worth even less.

So that's the problem they face, they would largely be selling the NFT's to you the fans unless they can find a way to make them appeal to a wider audience (Artwork only NFT's are hard to make blow up, there are somewhere artwork alone go viral and sell for hundreds of thousands but 99.9% struggle to sell and/or lose value) so they will have to basically profit on your fandom and desire for your club to get better by selling you something that will be worthless.

And lets not forget most NFT's if you sell them you don't get the full value, you have to pay gas fees (what transaction costs are called in crypto), you will pay the platform you are selling them on a fee and the creator can dictate an automatic amount they get from resales all of which comes out of your return before you have to potentially pay capital gains. Its the cut of resale where actually most creators of NFT's make their money, an NFT may only get them $10 on the first sale but if that ends up selling on the secondary market for $5000 with the average rate being in the 5-10% they would make $250 to $500 from that which is fine if its an NFT that explodes in price but as Man City and PSG's fan tokens show without utility the hardcore fans who buy them initially end up losing out.

They are certainly only likely to put their hands in their own pocket if crypto is going through another 100% rise and as such they can afford to drop another 100k or so into your bank account.

TBH if the club wanted to get involved in NFT's they would be best off approaching Sorare to get City officially licenced and cards for all your players added to that. The club and players not only get an initial licence fee but they also get a cut of all sales and resales and at least that's something with function beyond the NFT's that attracts both fans and non-fans of City

 

It's hardly like they have made a formal proposal. If they had you could say that its you and not Sutton and Stevenage but right now with that kind of contact it strikes me more as its a fact finding mission to see who might sell, which fans would be most accepting etc before making a decision

 

Rupp wouldn't have written it but his PR person would have. There is no way Sparks has written it without Rupp's knowledge or the clubs just made a statement up. The last thing you want if you are trying to sell a club (or if you aren't tbh) is chancers using the media to make it seem like things are further along than they are. It can put other bids off who perhaps don't feel they are far enough along in their plans to put in a rival bid or may feel they can't financially match them. And they wouldn't be the first to flirt with one club to get their profile up and then go after another target as football fans can feel swayed thinking they have got one over a rival which can mask some concerns