Investing in athletes
Tristan Boyer, a tennis player currently ranked 133rd in the world, just made it through three rounds of qualifying at the Australian Open to reach the main draw of a Grand Slam for the first time.
I enjoy watching tennis when I get the chance, but I don’t often find myself watching a player ranked outside the top 100. Yet I’ve been following Tristan for over a year for the simple reason that I invested in him through Fantium.
Fantium is a platform that enables users to invest in athletes, starting with tennis players, in exchange for a future percentage of their prize money. Fantium enters into legal agreements with athletes that commit to distributing future prize money to investors through the platform. There’s currently almost 30 players on Fantium that users can invest in.
Players use the money they raise to pay for coaches, travel, equipment or anything else needed to support their careers. Financially, tennis is a tough sport for players that aren’t at the very top and Fantium gives those players on their way up the needed financial support. The standard Fantium agreement specifies that, in exchange for providing financing, users earn a percentage of a player’s prize money for six seasons after the player enters the top 150 in the world rankings.
Under the hood, Fantium is built on Polygon. When users invest in a player they receive an NFT that represents ownership in the player’s future prize money. Users can hold the NFT to claim prize money when it arises, or sell the NFT on external marketplaces like Opensea. Going forward, additional products could be developed around the NFT, such as loan offerings that enable holders to take out loans collateralised with the NFT.
When I invested in Tristan one year ago he was ranked 268th in the world. By the end of last year, he had broken into the top 150, which means I’ll now receive a percentage of his prize money from last year and will continue to do so for the next five years.
Until now, investing in athletes has been limited to institutional investors or high-net-worth individuals, as the cost of packaging an athlete's future revenues into an asset accessible to the general public has been prohibitively high.
One of the superpowers of crypto is taking previously inaccessible or hard to access assets and making them accessible to everyone. Packaging future revenue streams of tennis players into NFTs that users can buy or sell seamlessly with minimal transaction costs does just that. The result has been a new experience that I’ve really enjoyed.