How Football Became Crypto’s Biggest Gateway Drug

In little over a month between October and November of 2025, the price of Bitcoin declined by more than 25%. In the very recent past, a major decline in such a short space of time would have sent investors and institutions — large and small — running for the hills. But while Bitcoin’s most recent decline did send negative ripples through the blockchain space, the institutions didn’t flinch. Instead, they doubled down.

Corporate adoption is often the first step towards wider adoption, and the signals coming from the top suggest the promises of mass uptake made by the Bitcoin-faithful for the past 15 years might actually come to fruition.

As important as institutional adoption may be, however, historical precedent suggests the largest influx of users to the crypto space arrives via gateways people are already familiar with. The rise of GameFi exemplified this at the start of the decade when gaming connected with the blockchain.

Now, another high-profile merger is taking place that connects the boardroom to the playing field. Sports — and football (or, as Americans call it, soccer) in particular — is one of the only recreational industries that has the global financial and cultural reach to exceed that of gaming. The passion that pours out of football stadiums on matchday is already being plugged into the blockchain industry in a way that stands to change how the average user interacts with crypto altogether.

Right at the same time as institutions are driving adoption from the top down, it’s being met by rising interest from football fans from the ground up.

Institutions adopt — but people gravitate to what they know

Throughout history, meaningful adoption of any new technology rarely began with the public: it began with kings and queens, religious leaders, entrepreneurs, eccentric inventors, and titans of industry.

Today, it begins with institutions, banks and multinational corporations, whose adoption signals that a new asset class is trustworthy enough to stake their reputations on. Those signals are picked up on by the public, and mainstream shifts in consciousness soon follow.

The Web3 space is undergoing just such a shift right now. An industry that was once obscured in the eyes of the public by heaps of jargon and constant volatility is now slowly becoming part of the routine financial infrastructure.

Corporate accumulation of bitcoin signals a cultural shift at the boardroom level as much as a financial one. But while this shift at the top is a necessary step towards wider adoption, the fact is: people are still more inclined to trust what they already know.

This notion was exemplified by the rise of GameFi (gaming finance) at the start of the decade, and the accompanying influx of new users that followed. Instead of jumping straight into the ‘crypto’ space per se, millions of new users entered the industry via the gateway of something they already knew and loved.

Data shows that between January 2018 and February 2022, the combined market cap of the GameFi space rose from $0.48 billion to over $22 billion. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, the number of active addresses on the Ethereum network (which was the main platform for the initial wave of GameFi apps) rose from 138,000 to over 1.1 million, according to on-chain data from BitInfoCharts.

Studies show that in the same year, the total number of crypto users increased from 106 million to 295 million. Some estimates suggest the GameFi industry accounted for 49% of all blockchain activity in that 12-month period.

Football: the only obsession to rival gaming

One of the only other entertainment industries that rivals the global, cross-generation cultural reach of gaming is sports. The Global Institute of Sport valued the worldwide value of the total sports market at $2.65 trillion at the end of 2024.

Estimates vary on the value of each individual sport within that broad bracket, however some assessments suggest football accounts for as much as 43% of the figure. By all measurements, football is the single most popular sport in the world, with as many as 3.5 billion fans worldwide — far ahead of the second most popular sport, cricket, with 2.5 billion fans.

With as many as 4,000 professional football clubs around the world (and up to 350,000 at the amateur level), it would be far easier to underestimate football’s value than to overstate it.

So, just as GameFi acted as the gateway for potentially millions of newcomers to the Web3 space in 2021, could football — and sports in general — be poised to act as the next major bridge for the crypto-curious?

The evidence we have at hand would suggest the answer is yes.

When sports met crypto

During the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) boom of 2018, opportunistic business graduates with all the requisite buzzwords on their LinkedIn profiles attempted to tie the revolutionary potential of the crypto space to any number of completely unrelated industries. This resulted in short-lived projects like Dentist Coin ($TEETH), Toast Coin ($BREAD) and Garbage Coin ($TRUTH) — (Those coins may or may not actually exist, but they convey the nature of the crypto industry at the time perfectly).

A cross-industry merger that proved to have a great deal more legs (pun intended) was that of football and crypto, resulting in a completely new market segment known as SportFi (sporting finance).

In 2019, global footballing institutions Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain led this merger by launching official club tokens for fans who wanted to gain a closer relationship with their favourite football teams.

This relationship was enabled by companies like Chiliz, who pioneered the ‘Fan Token’ model, and gave fans a way to not only invest in the success of their teams, but also have a say in club decisions via fan polls.

Besides being able to bank on the success of their favorite clubs, these token holders are also eligible for exclusive rewards like VIP access on match days, attending dinners with the team, and flying with the first-team squad to away games in continental competitions like the UEFA Champions League.

Fan tokens burst onto the scene

Fast-forward to 2025, and close to 100 sporting institutions have launched official tokens on a variety of blockchain networks, from Chiliz, to Binance, Polygon, Ethereum and others.

And it’s not just footballing giants like Barcelona ($BAR), Manchester City ($CITY), AC Milan ($ACM), Arsenal ($AFC) and Napoli ($NAP) — it’s also Esports organizations, Formula One teams, and mixed-martial arts titans like the Ultimate Fighting Championship ($UFC).

Daily trade volume records for sport-linked tokens suggests this isn’t merely a niche market segment. On any given day, trade volume for these tokens rivals that of tokens in the crypto market cap top 20, coming close to $1 billion during market peaks.

What’s more, blockchain data shows that the valuations of football tokens react directly to the success or failure of their teams during matchdays, especially during high-profile cross-continent competitions like the Champions League, the Club World Cup, or the international FIFA World Cup.

This gives football fans a way of understanding market movements that doesn’t demand in-depth crypto knowledge.

Instead, they can apply their native football knowledge to the crypto space, anticipating price movements depending on team form, the strength of opponents, player injuries, manager sackings, player signings, club investments, and much more.

In fact, football token prices have been shown to react not just to weekly results, but to minute-by-minute action on the pitch, spiking as goals are scored, dropping as goals are conceded, and going on almost year-long surges as the football teams they’re connected to go on lengthy unbeaten runs.

From boardrooms to stadiums: football as gateway drug

While technological and cultural shifts tend to arrive from the top down, uptake of emergent technologies still depend to a large extent on familiarity, and how the average person relates to choices put before them.

The rise of GameFi exemplified how technological adoption occurs via experiences the public already has a grasp on. With over 3.5 billion fans across the globe, football has the requisite cultural reach to become the most powerful entry point for the next wave of users to the crypto space.

That wave of users is already changing how crypto users read the market. Instead of speculating on the strength of jargon-laden whitepapers and perplexing tech mechanisms, fans, token holders, and everyday traders are applying their football knowledge to the crypto charts — taking what they know and using it to become familiar with something they don’t.

Sport-linked crypto tokens have the potential to draw in millions of users who might not have otherwise interacted with the crypto industry, and that shift is already underway.

Institutions are in the process of building the rails for mainstream adoption, but it’s the familiarity of sports — and, in particular, football — that will carry users across them.