In just over a month between October and November 2025, the price of Bitcoin fell by more than 25%. In the very recent past, a large drop in such a short period of time would have sent investors and institutions – large and small – running for the hills. But while Bitcoin’s recent decline sent negative ripples through the blockchain space, institutions didn’t back down. Instead, they doubled down.
Enterprise adoption is often the first step toward wider adoption, and the signals coming from the top suggest that the promises of mass adoption made by the Bitcoin stalwarts over the past 15 years may actually come true.
As important as institutional adoption can be, historical precedent suggests that the largest influx of users into the crypto space arrives via gateways that people are already familiar with. The rise of GameFi exemplified this at the beginning of the decade when gaming was connected to the blockchain.
Now another high-profile merger is taking place, connecting the boardroom to the playing field. Sports – and football (or, as Americans call it, football) in particular – is one of the only recreational industries that has the global financial and cultural reach to exceed gambling. The passion pouring out of football stadiums on match day is already being channeled into the blockchain industry in a way that will completely change how the average user interacts with crypto.
At the same time as institutions are driving adoption from the top down, it is being met with increasing interest from grassroots football fans.
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 credible enough to stake their reputation on. These signals are picked up by the public and mainstream shifts in consciousness soon follow.
The Web3 space is undergoing just such a shift right now. An industry once obscured in the public eye by heaps of jargon and constant volatility is now slowly becoming part of the routine financial infrastructure.
The corporate hoarding of bitcoin signals a cultural shift at the boardroom level as much as an economic one. But while this shift at the top is a necessary step toward wider adoption, the fact remains: people are increasingly inclined to trust what they already know.
This view was exemplified by the rise of GameFi (game financing) at the beginning 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 to something they already knew and loved.
Data shows that between January 2018 and February 2022, the total market value of the GameFi space increased 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) increased from 138,000 to over 1.1 million, according to on-chain data from BitInfoCharts.
Studies show that the total number of crypto users in the same year increased from 106 million to 295 million. Some estimates suggest that the GameFi industry accounted for 49% of all blockchain activity in the 12-month period.
Football: the only obsession of rival games
One of the only other entertainment industries that rivals the global, cross-generational cultural reach of gaming is sports. The Global Institute of Sport estimated the worldwide value of the total sports market at $2.65 trillion by the end of 2024.
Estimates vary on the value of each sport within the broad bracket, but some estimates suggest soccer accounts for as much as 43% of the figure. By all measures, football is the most popular sport in the world with a whopping 3.5 billion fans worldwide – well ahead of the second most popular sport, cricket, with 2.5 billion fans.
With as many as 4,000 professional football clubs around the world (and up to 350,000 at amateur level), it would be far easier to underestimate the value of football than to overestimate it.
So, just as GameFi acted as the gateway for potentially millions of newcomers to the Web3 space in 2021, could soccer – and sports in general – be poised to act as the next great bridge for the crypto-curious?
The evidence at hand suggests that the answer is yes.
When sports met crypto
During the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) boom of 2018, opportunistic business candidates with all the requisite buzzwords on their LinkedIn profiles tried to tie the revolutionary potential of the crypto space to any number of completely unrelated industries. This resulted in short-lived projects like Dentist Coin ($TEETH), Toast Coin ($BREAD) and Garbage Coin ($TRUTH) — (These coins may or may not exist, but they convey the nature of the crypto industry at the time perfectly).
One cross-industry merger that turned out to have a lot more legs (pun intended) was soccer and crypto, resulting in a whole new market segment known as SportFi (sports finance).
In 2019, global football institutions Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain led this merger by launching official club brands for fans who wanted to have a closer relationship with their favorite football team.
This relationship was made possible by companies like Chiliz who pioneered the ‘Fan Token’ model and gave fans a way to not only invest in their team’s success, but also influence club decisions via fan polls.
As well as being able to bet on the success of their favorite clubs, these token holders are also entitled to exclusive rewards such as VIP access on match days, attending dinners with the team and flying with the first team squad to away matches in continental competitions such as the UEFA Champions League.
Fan tokens burst onto the stage
Fast forward to 2025, and close to 100 sports institutions have launched official tokens on a variety of blockchain networks, from Chiliz to Binance, Polygon, Ethereum and others.
And it’s not just soccer giants like Barcelona ($BAR), Manchester City ($CITY), AC Milan ($ACM), Arsenal ($AFC) and Napoli ($NAP) – it’s also Esports organizations, Formula 1 teams and mixed-martial arts titans like the Ultimate Fighting Championship ($UFC).
Daily trading volume records for sports-linked tokens suggest that this is not just a niche market segment. On any given day, the trading volume of these tokens rivals that of tokens in the crypto market capitalization top 20, coming close to $1 billion during market peaks.
What’s more, blockchain data shows that the valuation of football tokens responds directly to the success or failure of their teams during match days, especially during high-profile cross-continental competitions such as the Champions League, the Club World Cup or the international FIFA World Cup.
This gives soccer fans a way to understand market movements that doesn’t require in-depth crypto knowledge.
Instead, they can apply their native football knowledge to the crypto space and predict price movements depending on team form, opposition strength, player injuries, manager firings, player signings, club investments and more.
In fact, football token prices have been shown to react not only to weekly results, but to minute-by-minute actions on the pitch, spikes as goals are scored, dips as goals are conceded, and near-year-long spikes while the soccer teams they’re linked to go on long undefeated runs.
From boardrooms to stadiums: football as a gateway drug
While technological and cultural shifts tend to come from the top down, the uptake of new technologies still largely depends on familiarity and how the average person relates to the choices put before them.
The emergence of GameFi exemplified how technology adoption happens via experiences that the public already grasps. With over 3.5 billion fans across the globe, soccer has the necessary cultural reach to become the most powerful entry point for the next wave of users into the crypto space.
This wave of users is already changing how crypto users read the market. Instead of speculating on the power of jargon-filled whitepapers and confusing technological mechanisms, fans, token holders and everyday traders apply their football knowledge to the cryptographers – taking what they know and using it to become familiar with something they don’t.
Sports-linked crypto tokens have the potential to attract millions of users who might not otherwise have interacted with the crypto industry, and that shift is already underway.
Institutions are building the rails for mainstream adoption, but it’s the knowledge of sports – and especially football – that will bring users across them.
