How Inter Milan’s Sponsor Socios Can Change How Fans Interact with Clubs Via Blockchain

Inter Milan is expanding fan resources and offering up new cryptocurrency tokens. How will this change the dynamic between the fans and the club?
With a lot of football clubs but especially the European ones, it is not unusual to find fans having a larger say in the activities of the club than one might expect.
They truly have the power to transform the way that the club is run and will show their displeasure if something happens that they don’t like.
Inter Milan has taken the next step to allowing them more interaction through their introduction of Socios “fan tokens”.
What are Fan Tokens?
Fan tokens are a form of cryptocurrency. Since this is quite a flexible form of currency, many teams who are adopting tokens are able to create their own.
In Inter’s case, the coin is going to be the $INTER, created and distributed by the blockchain provider Socios.
This is another opportunity for fans to be able to back the club and have their say on small things before each game. Are they going to be able to pick the line-up?
Of course not, that role is firmly staying in the hands of the managers, but they might be able to choose small details like the captain’s armband or the music the team walks out to.
They do this by purchasing the fan tokens. They will then be able to leverage these tokens on a club-exclusive app that will have a wide variety of opportunities for them.
In addition to offering input to the club, they will be able to take part in games, quizzes, and competitions. There is usually also a global leaderboard that will allow them to interact and compete with fans from all over the world, giving Inter the chance to interact with the many fans they have outside Italy.
How Does Blockchain Work?
At the heart of these schemes lies Socios’ blockchain. Blockchain systems are being used more readily across a wide variety of industries.
From the newest mobile casinos with astonishing features to thousands of transactions enacted each and every day. Indeed, recently the first house purchase to be made using a crypto currency on the blockchain – the future is here and now!
One reason why this technology is in use everywhere is because of the way in which it makes its records. The blockchain is made up of individual blocks which carry data about the transaction or action that has been recorded.
However, it places some of its data on the block before it in the chain, while also receiving a portion of data from the one behind it.
This means that it is very difficult to edit the blockchain. Editing one block means you would have to edit all of them, and we don’t have the computing power to do that since blockchains can
contain thousands of individual blocks. This means that anything recorded on the blocks will be accurate. When it comes to fan tokens, it means that it will be an accurate record of how many tokens an individual fan might own.
Will This Change Fan Interactions in Football?
Inter is not the only football club that has signed up for this scheme and introduced tokens for their fans to invest in. Over 40 major sporting organisations around the world have created agreements with Socios to introduce fan tokens.
This includes English Premier League teams Arsenal and Everton, in addition to other great European teams like Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona.
Will this change the relationship between clubs and their fans? At this stage, it might be a little difficult to tell. The fan tokens are not offering any significant power to club fans.
However, they do offer a chance for fans to interact with the club in a way that we have not really seen before.
Allowing their fans to choose things like the music before matches might seem trivial to those who are outside the world of football, but small decisions like this can be leveraged by the fans to show their attitude towards the club.
For example, if a manager had made a particularly unpopular decision recently, fans might vote for a song that usually represents an opposing team.
Blockchain technologies are becoming ever more mainstream, and their use here is a fantastic example of that. Fan tokens are likely to be warmly received by the biggest fans of each club.
With Inter being just one of many who are indulging in this, it would seem like this is a trend within the world of football that is here to stay. So long as the fans are happy to receive it, so will the clubs offer these kinds of opportunities.